Sir David Akers-Jones GBM KBE CMG JP (Chinese: 鍾逸傑; 14 April 1927 – 30 September 2019) was a British colonial administrator.
He was instrumental in turning small villages into "new towns" in the New Territories teeming with factories and apartment blocks to resettle slum-dwellers from the hillsides of Hong Kong Island.
Akers-Jones was instrumental in implementing the Small House Policy in 1972 in exchange for the New Territories indigenous groups' support for the new town development.
After the sudden death of Sir Edward Youde, Akers-Jones became Acting Governor of Hong Kong from December 1986 to April 1987.
After retiring from the post of Chief Secretary in 1987, he became Special Assistant to Governor Lord Wilson of Tillyorn for six months.
In the years leading up to the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, Akers-Jones was appointed as a Hong Kong Affairs Advisor to the Central Government of the PRC, from 1992 to 1997, after he relinquished chairmanship of the Hong Kong Housing Authority, having served a five-year term.
[7] In 2005, Akers-Jones briefly emerged from retirement to defend, before Hong Kong's Legislative Council, his role in zoning the Discovery Bay resort project on Lantau in the 1970s.
[8][9] With Hong Kong Disneyland subsequently opening nearby and property prices having skyrocketed as a result, suspicions about the fact that the original zoning plan was never enforced have again come to the fore.
He revealed that colonial officials had abruptly changed the zoning of the Discovery Bay project, and gave it to new developers because they feared it would fall into the hands of the former Soviet Union.