HE Sir Murray MacLehose
GBE KCMG KCVO
Government House
HONG KONG
SECRET
16 September 1976
THE PLANNING PAPER: FUTURE ACTION
1. In my letter of 20 August I said that we have been doing quite a lot of thinking and planning about communications between your Government and the Office about the Planning Paper and how best we in the Office can monitor progress in order to be able to report to Ministers and to Parliament on developments in the labour and social fields.
2. Subject to your views (and we shall discuss all this while I am in Hong Kong in October) it seems to us that the monitoring process itself here might be based on a series of check lists of progress made in implementing the summary of recommendations contained in paragraph 23 of Annex C to the Planning Paper, as well as the current programmes of the Hong Kong Government set out in Annex D to the Paper. We would propose to do this by identifying the individual measures in these two parts of the Planning Paper as well as any new measures which might emerge either as secondary results of the programmes in the Planning Paper or as part of your government's normal on-going policies. In order to be able to monitor progress in this way, if this should be the form which the process takes, we would need to be kept informed about the various stages in the implementation of individual measures.
3.
The monitoring process of the five-year programme will, of course, require the closest possible liaison with yourself and your successors and your senior officials. Much of this liaison will no doubt take place by correspondence between us. You will no doubt continue to visit London twice a year, and we hope that the Head of Hong Kong Department will also visit Hong Kong twice a year, that there will be at least one visit a year by each of the officers of the Department, and by one or other of the superintending Under-Secretaries - all of these would be in addition to regular visits by specialist advisers such as the Overseas Labour Adviser and the Economists.
4. It is, of course, for you to decide how best to carry Hong Kong opinion in reorganising the various measures in the
SECRET
10