Policy Address
Elderly and Rehabilitation Services
124. Apart from welfare measures in the form of cash subsidies, the current-term Government has substantially increased the recurrent expenditure on elderly services by 85% and that on rehabilitation services by 66%. Notwithstanding this, the demand for subsidised residential care services has exceeded the supply due to an ageing population. We must boost the short, medium and long-term supply of residential care services through a multi-pronged approach, including buying more places from private residential care homes, requiring private developers through conditions in suitable land sale projects to build specified welfare facilities, developing welfare facilities on Government sites, and in respect of suitable public housing projects in future, setting aside premises equivalent to about 5% of the total domestic gross floor area for welfare purposes.
125. Meanwhile, we will continue to increase the service places for day care and home care services to enable the elderly and persons with disabilities to age in place and live with their families. To facilitate our elderly people to retire in the Mainland, the Government will explore the extension of the Residential Care Services Scheme in Guangdong to cover other eligible residential care homes for the elderly in Mainland cities of the GBA, and the relaxation of the one-year continuous residence in Hong Kong requirement regarding applications for the OALA and the Old Age Allowance.
Pro-child
126. We have successively implemented a number of measures to strengthen child care services, which include the incorporation of the planning ratios for aided child care services into the Hong Kong Planning Standards and Guidelines, the provision of more child care service places, the introduction of the Child Care Centre Parent Subsidy, and the regularisation of measures to improve the Fee-Waiving Subsidy Scheme for After School Care Programme. In the year ahead, our pro-child efforts will focus on two areas. First, we must take action immediately to prevent child abuse tragedies from happening again. Upon consultation with stakeholders, we are formulating a legislative proposal to provide for a mandatory reporting mechanism on child abuse cases. Training for practitioners in the relevant professions to identify child abuse cases will be enhanced at the same time. Our target is to introduce the relevant bill into the next-term LegCo for scrutiny as soon as possible. Second, we will further increase the number of places of the On-site Pre-school Rehabilitation Services from 9 000 this year to 10 000 in the 2022/23 school year. With the gradual increase of service places, the policy objective of “zero waiting” time could be achieved in the foreseeable future.
