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The following is the opening address (English only) by the Chief Secretary for Administration, Mrs Anson Chan, at the Serving the Community Conference today (Wednesday):

'A CIVIL SERVICE FOR ASIA'S WORLD CITY'

Introduction and welcome

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I think you would all agreed that that was a pretty striking opening for the conference! I personally quite like the section about the lull before the storm, though I'm not sure I can actually remember such a lull in real life and I am sure you all have the same feelings.

First of all, I would like to welcome all of you to this very important event and thank you for finding time - I know how busy all of you are with day to day business. But, as I will emphasise later in the speech, I fear that it is not sufficient for us just to cope with day to day pressures. We need also to work together to deliver real improvements in the way that we manage and deliver public services - so in effect we all have two jobs. The second being the focus of today's conference.

Events since the last conference

It is over four years since I had the pleasure of opening the previous civil service conference on Serving the Community. As the video shows, quite a lot has happened since then:

* The return to China on 1 July 1997 went so smoothly that we often behave as if this unprecedented constitutional transition was a non-event.

* We have held successful LegCo and District Council Elections under 'One Country, Two Systems'.

* We faced and dealt with the threat of a major epidemic of bird flu, and in the process won praise from the international community for our decisiveness.

* We have now a new world class airport - albeit with a few more teething difficulties at the outset than we would have wanted.

* Asia experienced an economic crisis with dramatic effects for Hong Kong's economy - effects we finally appear to be leaving behind.

* We have seen the stock market reach a record 16,700 points , drop to 6,600, and return to 17,000.

* Our City was chosen as the site for the third Walt Disney theme park outside the US - bringing together two of the best-known global brands.

* Most recently, we have entered a new Millennium - and even better we have done so with the lights still on and the lifts working. As you can imagine that last comment was in square brackets for use if appropriate!

Challenges and opportunities ahead

Even by Hong Kong's standards I think we have certainly been 'living in interesting times'. But all the signs are that we face even more interesting times ahead. Some of the key challenges and opportunities ahead include:

* Addressing the ever growing needs of the population and the rising expectations of the community.

* Meeting these expectations from within resources constrained by the budget guidelines and GDP growth. Even as the economy turns the corner, I think that growth is very likely to be below the historic trend given our maturing economy.

* Coping with the increasingly fast moving and complex issues faced by the community - which typically require Government to get much better at working together quickly across traditional boundaries to deliver a successful response.

* Learning not just to cope with but to exploit the fast moving technological change which is transforming the way that we live and work. I gather that the jargon is 'moving at Internet speed', and

* Building Hong Kong's unique competitive advantage in the global and regional economies.

Vision for Hong Kong - Asia's world city

Some of our responses to these challenges will inevitably involve firefighting. But if we are to make real progress we have to lift our sight, and efforts, to the longer term. The Government has therefore been working with the community to develop a shared vision for Hong Kong's future and plotting the path to its achievement. Our vision is to turn Hong Kong into Asia's world city with all that that implies in terms of freedoms, quality of life, wealth, diversity, arts and culture.

Policy Objectives

All the policy secretaries have already established the foundations for this vision through their development and publication of policy objectives covering the whole of Government's activities, together with practical programmes to deliver them. These include such important elements as:

* Becoming a leading digital city in the globally connected world of the 21st Century.

* Maintaining and enhancing our status as a major international financial centre.

* Focusing on high value added and competitive industries.

* Improving our urban, rural and marine environment.

* Ensuring we remain a safe and secure city.

* Securing better housing for all.

* Ensuring that our elderly people enjoy a sense of security, health and happiness.

Policy objectives give clarity about the sort of Hong Kong we are aiming to achieve, and how we will measure success. The next great challenge is to ensure that we can deliver these results in practice.

Challenge for the civil service

As the closing scene of the earlier video showed, there is no doubt that front line civil servants are excited by this vision and keen to ensure that they play their part in delivering it. The challenge for senior civil servants - all the people gathered in this room today - is to provide the leadership to enable the civil service to achieve these goals.

In order to do this we have to be clear about those aspects of the civil service we must cherish and strengthen and those we must change and improve.

The elements to be retained and strengthened relate to people - ensuring that we build upon our core values and motivate our staff to give of their best. But it is just as important that we secure a step jump in civil service performance to meet the ever faster moving challenges we face.

Importance of people issues

One of the consequences, we are told, of the shift to a high-tech, high speed knowledge economy is that the traditional sources of competitive advantage are either disappearing or at least becoming more fleeting. In the information age the main capital is the knowledge in peoples' heads. Geographic location becomes less important, and each technological advance is soon spread and then overtaken.

I personally take some satisfaction from this - the importance of people is something we have never forgotten in the Hong Kong Government. The great success stories in today's economy involve motivated engaged people driven to achieve shared goals and thriving on the challenges and opportunities of the fast changing environment.

Government is so big and complex that it can be too easy for some of our civil servants to lose sight of the shared goals which provide the needed continuity through the changes. For most of our people, daily routine is relatively mundane. As leaders, we have to manage and motivate rather than just allocate work to our colleagues. We must reiterate the underlying purpose and values of the civil service. On a number of occasions I have summarised the civil service's aim of serving the community as including:

"Fostering stability and prosperity, improving the quality of life, caring for those in need, protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual, maintaining the rule of law and encouraging people to participate in their own affairs."

In delivering this aim civil servants must balance the interests of the broader community, those in need, the employed, the unemployed and our business community. The civil service must therefore retain its integrity. Its advice must be impartial and apolitical, taking account of broader community interests and drawing on experience of what is practical. The civil service I believe provides a force for fairness in dealing with interest groups. It provides a long-term perspective on the shorter-term preoccupations of politicians and the media.

For me, maintaining ethical standards is vital to the public sector, it is the bed rock. Professor Hennessy, our keynote speaker today, once said how struck he was that when former Soviet satellites began to send their people to London, what they sought most of all was advice on how to create clean, decent and politically neutral public services out of the wreckages of the old party apparatuses. They were of course also interested in new public management processes and techniques but the old enduring values intrigued them most and seemed to be the pearls-beyond-price which they were seeking. As we move ahead into yet more interesting times we will continue to emphasise and strengthen these basic values.

Yet, and I stress, this is not a recipe for preserving the status quo or being risk averse. These core values are strong enough to cope in the more challenging environment that we must create if we are to bring about the much needed step jump in performance.

Step jump in performance

By step jump I mean achieving an improvement which is greater in scale and pace than we have seen in the past. The need to improve civil service performance is clearly not unique to Hong Kong. Radical changes have been and continue to be made in governments in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Singapore, and so on. These governments are reviewing the proper limits of the public sector, and whether more services can be better delivered by the private sector. They are searching for joined-up government, overcoming the traditional silo mentality in both policy making and service delivery, and they are focusing on the results to be achieved. Our speakers today will draw on many of these themes.

We have reflected on these trends and what they tell us about the opportunities for improvement in the Hong Kong Government. We are prepared to borrow solutions developed elsewhere but tailored to fit Hong Kong's circumstances. By learning from experience elsewhere, I am sure we can make change happen faster and secure better results!

Vision for the Hong Kong Government of the future

We have defined a clear vision of the way in which Government will manage and deliver public services by, say 2005. This embraces four key elements - excellent customer service, managing for results by results, securing joined-up government, and achieving world class productivity.

First, Government should be every bit as passionate about delivering excellent customer service as the private sector. The fact that our customers often have nowhere else to go should drive us to greater efforts in this area. We need to improve communication and feedback from the community and our customers so that we can develop and deliver responsive, high quality services that meet their needs.

Second, our response to community concerns must shift from spending more money to achieving better results, and from responding to short-term pressures to achieving the long-term development agenda. We must use the policy objectives to state the outcomes of Government's efforts are intended to deliver and define how we will measure success. We also need to give our managers both the flexibility to manage resources and clear accountability for delivery. This includes being clear about the Government's role, and those areas where the community, and the private and voluntary sectors, are best left to take the lead. Here our policy of positive non-intervention gives us the right start, and the great success of the trading funds shows the value of institutional reform.

Third, we need to achieve "joined up government". With 15 bureaux and over 70 departments this is difficult - it is all too tempting to work within our own little bunkers. At policy level we need to review each issue in the context of Government's corporate agenda, and work together to agree a shared policy reflecting our priorities. At departmental or service level we need to ensure that our customers have convenient access to one stop shop services, rather than having to search from department to department. We must be willing to organise around our customers needs rather than expecting them to fit around us.

Fourth, if we are to cope with rising needs and expectations, we have to raise productivity. This includes reengineering the way Government works, from the front-line through to support services. We need to develop new ideas and models for delivering services, making the best of the opportunities of Internet and E Business, for example through the Electronic Service Delivery programme and the call centre project. The productivity gains already identified under the Enhanced Productivity Programme and the call centre project are a good start, and I thank you all for your efforts, but much more will be required. We need to re-examine how we employ, develop and reward the civil service - our most important resource in meeting community need. SCS's work on Civil Service Reform is vital here.

Securing real improvement

I would also like to say a few words, and make an appeal for your help, in terms of how we make these improvements happen in practice. The Efficiency Unit is charged with co-ordinating our policy objective of securing continuous improvement in the management and delivery of public services. Yet the primary responsibility for securing improvement rests with all of us in this room - the senior management teams of each bureau and department. The Efficiency Unit, Management Services Agency and the Resource Bureaux all stand ready to assist you in your efforts, with ideas, experience and practical assistance. Please feel free to go to them from help, and by all means let me know if they are not responsive! But the prime impetus must come from all of you. You know your customers' needs, you know your business, and you know where the main opportunities for improvement lie. My greatest wish from this conference is that we will unleash your entrepreneurial spirit and thus lift the pace of change.

In conclusion, I hope that you will agree that we have an exciting vision for the future of Government, and that you will share with me the journey to achieving it. As I have said, the civil service in Hong Kong has many strengths which we must nurture and strengthen. But there are many aspects we need to change and improve. The regional and global economy in which Hong Kong operates is changing fast. In response Hong Kong itself, our society and our economy, is seeking to achieve a major transformation. It would not be acceptable for the civil service to sit on the sidelines in its own "safe" environment. We have an impact on almost every aspect of the community's life and work, and we must extend ourselves to do all we can to work in partnership with the community to build Hong Kong's successful future as Asia's World City. I know that I can rely on your wholehearted commitment to this great endeavour.

Thank you. I wish you a very successful conference.

Photo: The Chief Secretary for Administration, Mrs Anson Chan, attended a conference for senior government officials. The Conference, focusing on the crucial role of the civil service in Hong Kong's future success, was organised by the Efficiency Unit. Picture shows Mrs Chan delivering an opening address at the conference.

End/Wednesday, January 5, 2000

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