Hong Kong gov’t targets 950,000 vulnerable residents for poverty alleviation programme
Hong Kong Free Press
Hong Kong’s government has identified around 950,000 elderly people, single-parent households, and tenants of subdivided flats as targets for its poverty alleviation programme.
The Labour and Welfare Bureau said it identified some 214,200 subdivided flat residents, 213,300 people in single-parent households, and 555,300 people in elderly households as targets for assistance. Some residents were listed in more than one group, meaning around 950,000 people will be targeted.
The government will continue to implement poverty alleviation projects announced in Chief Executive John Lee’s 2023 Policy Address, including the Strive and Rise mentorship programme, as well as care schemes for students and elderly households, the bureau said.
Poverty
The bureau said in a paper to the Legislative Council that it would also rework its poverty index to address a possible “overestimation” of the number of Hongkongers living in poverty.
The overhaul of the poverty metric was initially revealed this February, when labour and social welfare chief Chris Sun said authorities were working on a new index to measure poverty taking into account employment status, income, rent and living environment.
The bureau said the current metric uses household income as the sole indicator of poverty, “which may lead to possible over-estimation of the poverty situation.”
See also: Hong Kong Policy Address: Reviewing 3 of Chief Executive John Lee’s key measures from 2022
Since the city’s poverty line operates on the principle of “relative poverty” – a comparative measure – poor households will always exist regardless of the effectiveness of poverty alleviation work, it said.
“This may create the wrong impression to the public that ‘more people become poor despite more resources being put in.’ These limitations will in the long run weaken the function of the ‘poverty line’ in monitoring the actual poverty situation,” it added.
In Hong Kong, any household with less than 50 per cent of the median monthly household income before tax and welfare transfers is considered to be living in poverty.
The government will also formulate separate key performance indicators for targeted poverty alleviation projects.
The paper also cited concerns raised by lawmakers at a 2022 meeting that using public funds to roll out non-recurrent measures, including cash handouts or tax breaks, would “only reduce the poor population and improve the poverty rate in the short term.”
The legislature’s welfare services panel is scheduled to discuss the paper next Monday.
The government-appointed Commission on Poverty, which first launched the city’s poverty line in 2013, stopped releasing its annual poverty report in 2022.
Oxfam’s Hong Kong office, meanwhile, has found that Hong Kong’s wealth gap widened after the pandemic, with the city’s poorest making less than 0.02 per cent of what the wealthiest made in the first quarter of 2023 – the widest income gap in decades.
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