A cheap paint job can’t hide the fire tragedy or spiralling chaos at New Lucky House, the scene of a tragic fire in April

Roundtable lawmaker Michael Tien has launched a blistering attack on government plans to increase fire safety fines, claiming it was common knowledge that Hong Kongers are “not afraid of paying fines” and that only stiff prison sentences could begin to tackle the city’s huge fire safety problems.

Speaking at a LegCo Bills Committee meeting last week to debate new fire safety laws, Tien asked Security Bureau and Fire Services Department (FSD) officials why people breaking window maintenance laws could be jailed while those ignoring fire safety instructions would only attract small fines.

“I need to air my grievances,” said Tien, pointing out that 360 people had died in building fire incidents in the past 18 years and that new fire laws needed “teeth” to improve compliance.

Five people were killed at a fire which engulfed New Lucky House in Jordan in April this year: that building had been subject to dozens of fire safety orders and building code violations, largely ignored, in the last 16 years.

The death toll at New Lucky House was stoked by lax attitudes of both authorities and owners, with faulty fire doors and blocked fire escapes directly linked to at least three of the five deaths if not more, and creating a terrifying ordeal for residents and tourists trying to escape guesthouses on the middle floors.

This broken fire door is one of 46 either defective or illegally propped open in New Lucky House: it has escaped 57 inspections by FSD since April

Not much has changed at New Lucky House in the four months since the deadly blaze: a Transit Jam investigation at the crumbling composite building this weekend found 46 out of 86 pairs of fire doors still defective or illegally propped open.

This despite FSD yesterday claiming a total of 57 inspections at the building since the fire on 10 April and issuing, FSD says, 31 Fire Hazard Abatement Notices (FHANs) to deal with rampant failings.

Of course, prosecutions are rare.

At the end of 2023 Hong Kong had a staggering 175,000 fire safety directions outstanding or ignored, representing 45% of the total number of fire safety directions ever issued, yet FSD figures reveal a prosecution rate of just 8% over the last 14 years.

And where owners are convicted, fines are often way below maximum penalties.

Under the law, failing to comply with a FHAN can attract a maximum fine of $100,000 and $10,000 per day of non-compliance.

But in the case of the 31 FHANs issued to New Lucky House since April, only 21 have been complied with, according to FSD, and only one has been prosecuted. In that case, the relevant party was fined just $8,000: a small fraction of the maximum and with no daily penalty incurred.

Following Transit Jam’s weekend findings of more than half the fire doors being still defective, FSD ran a follow-up raid yesterday and says three “wedged open” fire doors were found and “immediately closed by relevant responsible persons” upon the issue of FHANs, while 27 defective fire doors were “still noted” and being handled. FSD pledges that prosecution proceedings are in progress.

Separately, FSD says it also filed charges against the Incorporated Owners of New Lucky House for deficient fire safety installations (such as hoses). Ultimately, the owners pled guilty to five charges but were fined a total of just $30,000.

Buildings Department (BD), which shares some fire safety responsibility with FSD, is equally ineffective when it comes to prosecuting owners: it found seven serious building violations at New Lucky House in 2019 and 2020. Just one owner took the violation seriously and began works; one appealed and cannot be forced to rectify the violation until the appeal is discharged (the appeal is still going on today, five years later); one owner could not be found; and four were prosecuted.

Of those four, one is still under court process four years later while three were convicted in 2023, being fined an average of HK$18,600 each but then still, today, failing to even start the necessary work.

In May, BD told Transit Jam it was “considering” initiating new prosecutions against those three. BD did not yet respond to questions on whether it was still considering enforcing the law in these cases.

Running out of time

While BD prevaricates, New Lucky House doesn’t appear to have the luxury of time. The building is in a rotten state, even forgetting the fire safety failings, and is spiralling fast towards ghetto territory: the guesthouse corridors smell of fire, soot, urine, stale beer and cigarette smoke, while new A4 notices warn residents against “defecating in public”.

A quick and nasty paint job covers sooty walls and telecoms gear

The blackened walls and even the charred wood of the lower floors have simply been smothered in cheap white paint which does nothing to remove the overpowering smell of soot remaining from the April tragedy. On one floor, a contractor left a five-gallon bucket of paint upended, a thick glacier of sticky paint creeping across most of the stairwell. An iron bedstead blocks another stairwell, while smokers drop still-lit cigarettes on every floor.

The lax enforcement, slow prosecutions and low fines breed neglect and nihilism by owners and building management, highlighting exactly the issues raised by Michael Tien, who says Hong Kong’s new fire safety laws need the fear of prison to bring owners into line.

But while Hong Kong’s National Security laws are implemented at lightning speed, the legislative amendments for life-saving fire safety issues are stuck in the doldrums: the law’s amendments were first proposed in 2021 and are only now at the beginning of the bills committee stage.

To their credit, authorities have pledged to move faster on fire safety inspection and enforcement within existing laws following the New Lucky House deaths.

According to Michael Yung Kam-hung, Deputy Chief Fire Officer (Building Improvement) with FSD, inspectors targeted to urgently inspect over 1,000 high-risk buildings since the New Lucky House fire, and, by the end of last week had completed around 700 of those inspections, issuing around 5,000 improvement notices. Most of those notices related to blocked fire escapes or faulty fire doors, said Yung: in other words, the problems of New Lucky House are the problems of 1,000 other buildings in Hong Kong.

DAB: delay fire inspections to reduce price

But not everyone wants to see work proceeding at full speed. At the LegCo Bills Committee meeting last week, DAB’s Ben Chan Han-pan, also a Vice President at China State Construction International (a firm reliant on fire service contractors for building fit-out and inspections), called on the government to delay or stagger its latest inspection efforts to avoid bottlenecks in fire services contracting work.

“We don’t have many fire safety improvement contractors, so the government should bear in mind the contractors available in the market when issuing [safety directives], and not to do them all in one go because the market will be disrupted and the cost will go up,” he said.

The government responded that there were some 1,000 fire service contractor firms registered in the city, with 92 already “whitelisted” as trusted firms under a new scheme to help inexperienced building owners start the safety improvement process.

The Bills Committee also blanched at proposed surcharges for owners if the government steps in to carry out essential work itself.

Under the government’s draft law proposals, authorities would be able to rectify the worst dangers and bill the owners later, adding a 20% surcharge as part penalty, part brokerage fee. But many lawmakers called for a complete waiver of the surcharge, citing “elderly” and “inexperienced” owners who needed support and who held up other owners from getting work approved.

While lawmakers complained the cost of fire safety work might be prohibitive, the government calculated that, with a generous $5.5 billion subsidy already made available, for most buildings such as New Lucky House, the work would cost on average around $10,000 to $20,000 per unit.

Many lawmakers on the Bills Committee still argued that bringing older buildings up to code would still be a great financial burden for owners – an argument which may fall on unsympathetic ears given the humblest tong lau apartment in a 1980s composite building in Yau Ma Tei today commands a market value of around $3-4 million and a 600 sq ft apartment in New Lucky House itself is on the market for $5.8 million (US$750,000).

The building and its residents may be impoverished, but the owners are not poor.

Owners neglect fire safety yet profit from multiple families, including many young children, living in illegal huts and subdivided rooms on the roof of New Lucky House