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Following is the transcript of remarks by the Chief Secretary for Administration and Chairman of the Steering Committee on the Community Care Fund, Mr Stephen Lam, at a media session after chairing a meeting of the Steering Committee on the Community Care Fund at Central Government Offices, Tamar, this afternoon (February 20):
Chief Secretary for Administration: Thank you very much for coming to this media session. We have just had the Community Care Fund Steering Committee meeting. Today we have approved three additional measures under the fund.
Firstly, we are going to provide dentures support funding to enable the elderly in Hong Kong to obtain such services from our dentists. And these measures of support will be available to elderly persons who are not receiving Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) because those who receive CSSA will already be eligible for a dental allowance. Also, they have to be served by the Social Welfare Department under the subvented home care services. We have provided up to $100 million for this service, and each elderly person will receive an allowance of over $8,700. We believe this will be able to benefit about 11,000 elderly persons.
Secondly, we have approved an after-school care pilot programme. We have reserved $40 million for this. We have received expressions of interest from over 200 NGOs and schools to arrange this service. The service will be available to children whose parents are unable to look after them after school, and the schools and the NGOs will design programmes which will enrich the after-school classes which these students will attend.
Thirdly, we have also approved a scheme to enable elderly persons who live in private rental properties and who do not hold private property. We are providing one-off allowances to these private premises¡¦ elderly tenants so as to provide a relief measure to enable them to meet their livelihood demands. Singleton elderly persons will get $4,000 on a one-off basis, doubleton elderly persons will get $8,000, and tripletons will get $12,000.
Up to now, we have already approved 15 measures under the Community Care Fund. We have reached a stage whereby we need to begin, during this year, a process of evaluating these measures, the impact these measures have had on our community, and their long-term practicability. We want to regularise some of these measures so that the financial expenditure in future years will be borne by our relevant departments. We intend to commence this regularisation review. We will file our reports with the relevant panels of the Legislative Council, and following that we will put proposals to the Legislative Council Finance Committee for these measures to be put on a regular basis.
Reporter: (Inaudible.)
Chief Secretary for Administration: This is the last question which I will respond to and thereafter I'll hand over to CK. So far we've got $5 billion from the Legislative Council allocation, we've got 1.8 billion from private sector donations. We are making use of these funds to generate regular revenue, and every year we will spend the amount which will enable us to keep the fund going - we won't overspend. And also, this process of regularisation will help the management of this fund in future, because if we regularise some of these measures then the resources which we have been investing in these measures will be released in future years for new measures.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Monday, February 20, 2012
Issued at HKT 21:21
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