20 Constitution and Administration
staff, identify and groom officers with potential for advancement to senior management and develop a pool of talent for senior positions.
The Government values regular communication and consultation with staff. There are four consultative councils at the central level: the Senior Civil Service Council, the Model Scale 1 Staff Consultative Council, the Disciplined Services Consultative Council and the Police Force Council. More than 80 consultative committees operate at the departmental level. The Civil Service Newsletter is published regularly to provide an added link with serving and retired civil servants.
Civil Service Reform
To ensure that Hong Kong continues to maintain a world-class civil service which keeps pace with changes in society, the Government has introduced a number of reforms since it released its public consultation document in 1999. The reforms cover the following five main areas:
1. Streamlining the Civil Service Establishment
The Government has set a target to reduce the civil service establishment to around 160 000 by 2006-07. The target was reached through process re-engineering, organisational review and outsourcing. The civil service establishment has been reduced by about 18.7 per cent from about 198 000 posts in early 2000 to about 161 000 at the end of March 2007. Two rounds of the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) were introduced one each in 2000 and 2003 to enable staff in a total of 232 designated grades with an identified or anticipated staff surplus to retire from the service voluntarily with compensation and pension payments. Some 15 100 applicants have been approved to leave the service voluntarily to bring about long-term savings to the Government. In addition, a general recruitment freeze was imposed on April 1, 2003. The general recruitment freeze was lifted in April 2007 to pre-empt possible succession problems in the civil service. To continue to keep the size of the civil service under control, new posts were only created when the operational need was fully justified and alternative means of service delivery found not feasible.
2. Reviewing Civil Service Pay and Benefits
The policy for civil service pay is to offer sufficient remuneration to attract, retain, and motivate staff of a suitable calibre to provide the public with an effective, efficient and high quality service. In order that civil service pay can be regarded as fair and reasonable by both civil servants who provide the service and the public who foot the bill, the Government adopts the principle that civil service pay should be broadly comparable with private sector pay.
As part of ongoing efforts to modernise the management of the civil service, the Government has embarked on an exercise to develop an improved civil service pay adjustment mechanism for the long term. Carrying out pay level surveys periodically is an important part of the improved mechanism. In 2005, the Government commissioned a professional consultant to conduct a pay level survey. The survey collecting data using April 1, 2006 as the reference date was completed in December 2006.