Hong Kong housing secretary resigns over fire that killed 168

Hong Kong's housing secretary, Winnie Ho, has resigned after an independent committee found that the Housing Bureau's inspection unit failed in its duties supervising maintenance work at Wang Fuk Court, the apartment complex where a fire last November killed 168 people and displaced thousands.

Chief Executive John Lee opened a press conference on Thursday by bowing, along with seven other top officials, and said Ho "should bear political responsibility," though no personal wrongdoing was found. She resigned Wednesday, nearly a year after the blaze engulfed seven buildings in a northern suburban district — the city's deadliest fire in decades.

The committee's report reconstructs a failure with an almost bureaucratic completeness. A worker's lighted cigarette — butts and partly burnt cardboard were found on the flat roof where the fire started — ignited renovation materials. Foam boards, non-fire-retardant scaffolding nets and canvases spread it. Workers had replaced staircase windows with movable aluminum panels for their own convenience, letting smoke fill the escape routes; opaque foam boards covering apartment windows delayed evacuation; and the fire alarm system had been shut down. Most of the dead suffocated rather than burned.

The report names the main culprits without hesitation: Will Power Architects, the project consultant, and Prestige Construction & Engineering, the main contractor, cut corners at every stage. But the report's sharpest lines are aimed upward. An array of registered contractors and building professionals, it found, did no substantive work and lent their names to rubber-stamp statutory forms for a fee. "Deception succeeded because the regulators' own practices enabled it," the committee wrote. The Housing Bureau's independent checking unit and the Buildings Department, the two agencies responsible for supervising the work, failed in that supervision — including by giving consultants and contractors advance notice of site inspections, and by failing to investigate the foam boards and scaffolding despite multiple complaints.

Lee announced a three-month investigation into four government agencies to determine whether staff were derelict, and officials proposed measures including criminalizing bid rigging. In a legislature rebuilt after the national security crackdown, the accountability now runs through the chief executive's press conferences alone.

The prenotified inspections found the hazards on neither of their chances, and 168 people died in the smoke between them.