A study of the impacts of the marking scheme on controlling anti-social behaviour in Hong Kong public rental housing estates

Abstract

Anti-social behaviour (AS B) in social housing is a major social concern. Because it destroys the living environment and ruins the quality of life, the need for intervention is never disputed. In the UK and Australia, strategies instituted against ASB are either prevention- or enforcement-focused. In Hong Kong, with the rapid development of the public rental housing (PRH) programme and the fast growth of PRH estates since 1953, pure reliance on the provisions of the tenancy agreement to arrest ASB has proved futile. Given the diverse backgrounds of the PRH tenants and the ever-surging PRH population, the Hong Kong Housing Authority seized the outbreak of SARS in 2003 as an opportune time to launch a new set of ASB control - the Marking Scheme (MS) - in the hope of improving the living environment and producing such social outcomes as civic responsibility and neighbourliness amongst its tenants. As a penalty-paint-driven system leading to tenancy termination, the MS is built on several key social-work and psychological concepts/theories including direct social control, broken window theory, conditioning and social learning, all aimed to induce behaviour change amongst the PRH residents. Notwithstanding the 10-year history of the MS, studies of this mode of ASB control mechanism are few. The handful of studies now available in the academia focuses only on the fairness, justifications and effectiveness of the MS. There is no study of whether it can bring about behaviour change. This research serves to fill the gap. By analyzing the survey results collected from a couple of young and old estates in a "City of Sadness" - Tin Shui Wai, it has found that the greatest impact of the MS on controlling ASB is its capability of inducing behaviour change. It is this capability that makes it tick.