Our building conservation programme started ten years ago. We have made remarkable progress in conserving and preserving our built heritage. We can measure our success in three ways - quantity, quality and an appreciation of our heritage buildings. We have restored more than 2,000 buildings. This is about 40 per cent of the 5,344 heritage buildings identified for conservation and preservation.
Many more buildings are in the midst of being restored.
It is a significant number considering the complexity of restoration works and the initial lack of experience in this new field. When we started out, we had no established building conservation guidelines. We began from scratch and continuously refined the guidelines as we went along. Today, I am proud to say that URA has established a good framework of guidelines to help our developers in their restoration works. Secondly, quality, by which I mean the quality of our restoration works.