The Chief Secretary for Administration, Mr Chan Kwok-ki, hosted a press conference on press conference on Report on Impact of Targeted Poverty Alleviation Strategy in Hong Kong today (June 18). Also present were the Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Mr Chris Sun, and the Permanent Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Ms Alice Lau, with members of Commission on Poverty, namely Honorary President of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries Mr Jimmy Kwok; the Chief Executive Officer of St James' Settlement, Ms Josephine Lee; and the Chief Executive of the Tencent Charity Foundation, Dr James Li. Following are their remarks at the press conference:

Reporter: First, does the Government have the number of how many people have been lifted out of poverty thanks to the poverty alleviation measures? If no, how can the Government assess the effectiveness of these measures when we are talking about poverty alleviation, and does that mean Hong Kong will no longer have a poverty line? Second, the Government has for the first time adopted the concept of social transfer values in poverty alleviation measurement, which shows the benefits received by households. How does this actually tell the effectiveness of the poverty alleviation efforts? How does the Government assess whether the amounts are enough to help those in need. Does that justify not providing more financial support? Thank you.

Secretary for Labour and Welfare: Thank you for your question. As the Chief Secretary has said very clearly, when we talk about targeted alleviation of poverty, it is based on a very comprehensive basic services provided in the fields of social service, medical, education, and also public housing. So all these four areas, you can imagine, provide a very comprehensive basic support for a wide spectrum of people in Hong Kong who are in need of different forms of Government support for them. But on top of that, we are also conscious about the needs of some special groups. They include those living in sub-divided flats, those who are single parent families, and what we call, all-elderly families. They have needs other than what is usually provided through social welfare, medical, education and public housing. Then we designed targeted services. This includes visits by the Care Teams and Community Living Rooms. All these are designed to help different groups. I think the key is to look at the for each individual project, we are more focused on KPIs and whether we have been able to achieve all those pre-set KPIs. It is clearly shown in the report. I think we are more than meeting the KPI requirements. So this all shows that these targeted alleviation projects achieved the stated objectives, by helping all those groups and targeted groups of people whom we believe they need our help. 

     And a part of that, we have provided with new tools, as you have mentioned, the social transfer values. This is an internationally recognised way to monetise, and to give you a value about the services provided by the Government. I think the best way is to visualise the fact, if you turn to page 168 and 169 of the Report, we have given you some very typical examples, including the elderly and families living in a public housing estates, and those receiving elderly services or receiving cash subsidies from the Government, so they show you in a very easily understandable way. So if all the services provided by the Government had to be obtained from the market, of course assuming all these services are available in the market, what would be the value in monetary terms of all these services? To give you an idea about the support provided to all those people who are in need of help, this is the way to look at what we are doing right now about targeted alleviation of poverty. Thank you. 

Chief Secretary for Administration: I want to supplement that in terms of beneficiaries, and according to our records for the Sham Shui Po Community Living Room as an example, so far there are about 520 000 number of attendance, and for the Strive and Rise programme, we all together have more than 14 000 students, and for the after-school care service, the quota is 10 500. These are the beneficiaries.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the remarks.)

Ends/Thursday, June 18, 2026
Issued at HKT 20:20

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