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and in the coming year, we are budgeting for a total expenditure of $519 million of which $307 million would be on staff cost (over 71%). Therefore, as I said before, serious and constant attention should be paid to our staff management. In other areas, we can do our part to effect some savings; for instance, we may increase the fees and rents at the expense of the popularity of the Council, and we may, though with certain amount of difficulties, make our operations more efficient and economical. But what we can increase in fees and rents and economising our expenditure is negligible in comparison with costs in staff matters of which we do not have much control. I think the Council is in the right direction in employing professional consultants to advise on the efficiency of the Council's secretariat, and I think that the results of the Government's exercise in organization and methods on the Urban Services Department should be made known to the Council.
Under the Memorandum of Administrative Arrangements signed with the Government, the Urban Council has no jurisdiction on certain aspects of the staff matters, and now foreseeing that the Council will run at a deficit in the coming years, although we may increase the rates, I presume it would be a right time either in the coming few months or later in the next year, to review the terms of the Memorandum.
During the past years, it has come to our attention as well as the attention of the Government that the Memorandum contains many ambiguous or uncertain provisions, and much time and energy had been used up to clarify these provisions. If the uncertain part involves a substantial amount of money and great difference of opinion, there is a possibility that certain part of the Memorandum may require judicial interpretation. Instances were the reimbursement to be paid to Government on the columbarium a few years ago and on the calculation of on-cost of staff emoluments. Very fortunately, there is a provision in the Memorandum of Administrative Arrangements that whenever the Government increases the salaries in the civil service without giving notice to the Urban Council, the Government would be responsible for the increase for that particular year. Personally, I do not think this is adequate because the Urban Council may find it difficult to adjust the cash flow. I would suggest that the Government should be responsible for the increase in the year when the increase has not been notified as well as for the year immediately subsequent.
The question of staff matters exercises the minds of members of the Urban Council, especially the members of the Finance Select Committee. We realize that no matter how much effort had been spent in other areas, any loophole, wastage, or inefficiency, however small, in this respect, would upset such efforts. I think members of the public should know that in managing the cash of the
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Urban Council, luckily we had not followed the footsteps of the Government in placing our money in London. We had been able to deposit our money with the wide sector of the licensed banks, which would indirectly promote the Council's image because our deposits would not be confined to one or two banks. We can obtain thereby a competitive rate of interest, and I think this deserves a word of praise. In the past years, we found that various small projects of the Urban Council cannot be carried out as efficiently as commercial concerns. The Council should consider in the coming years the possibility of opening a separate maintenance section with our own architects and maintenance engineers and a technical staff.
With the huge amount of maintenance charges paid annually, any commercial concern would actively consider establishing an engineering subsidiary.
Regarding the question of hawkers, I think it makes the Urban Council most unpopular. I really do not think that we can deny this, while we are spending so much money and manpower trying to solve the problem, which is social, economic, and political. We have not formulated a good hawker's policy that makes everybody happy. In the files of the Department, one can trace, and some members of the Council will recall, that there are some unsatisfactory areas. Members will recall that there was one registered stall holder flying back from the United Kingdom just for the purpose of presenting himself to the Department to renew the license which he had sub-contracted. Members will recall that a group of hawkers offered to purchase a bank building when we tried to resite them to the other side of the street so that the liquidator of the bank may fetch a better price. The most recent case was in a newspaper's report that a cooked food stall changed hands at a consideration of over $100,000. Another story I have heard is about a solicitor's secretary asking him whether he could recognize the old lady who had just finished a half-million-dollar property deal. When the solicitor said no, the secretary just reminded him that she was the newspaper hawker next door. As members of the Council, of course, we are not jealous, and we do not mind that people get rich in their professions. The question is whether the ratepayers' money, a substantial part of the budget of the Urban Council, should be used to subsidize them. Do members think that we should separate an industry from welfare? The argument, on the other side, is, of course, that these are isolated and exceptional cases. With all these matters in mind, I always favour the idea of separating the cooked food stalls from hawkers. If members of the public patronize hawkers' stalls in certain districts such as Happy Valley, they may usually find that the prices
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