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Mr Hui Yin-fat: Governor, it so happened that I happen to ask always the same question for some new light, perhaps you can develop some more thinking on that. This is about your pledge in 1992, as has been said by Mr Lee, that you promised severely disabled persons, not only for mentally handicapped persons, a residential place, additional residential places of 3,930. And however this plan failed to account for the increase in demand over the years. It has been estimated that residential places for severely disabled persons increased by 130 per year which means that disregarding the factor of slippage of planned services, there will still be an additional shortfall of around 650 places by 1997. Sir, since it takes time to plan and to implement a service, how would you sort of deal with this slippage and additional need? Although I know that you have been saying that you try your best, but what about the additional need and so forth because the severity is really much? Thank you Sir.
Governor: Well, I won't go over all the ground that I explored in my first answer. I hope the Legislative Council will take our word that we are determined to do everything we can to come as close to meeting the targets that I set out in 1992 as possible. The Honourable Member is quite right to say that those were the targets identified on the basis of present knowledge in the Green Paper on Rehabilitation. We'll be issuing a White Paper on Rehabilitation this Summer, I hope within the next month or so, and when we issue that White Paper we will have to look at how targets are rolled forward and the implications for future provision and therefore future expenditure patterns.
There have been a couple of problems that we mentioned last Autumn in going forward as rapidly as we would have liked. The first which I mentioned in my earlier answer is that not all neighbourhoods have been as positive about receiving the mentally handicapped as I'm sure the majority of the community would have liked. I think a now infamous egg which greeted my arrival at a housing estate a few weeks ago was specifically associated with provision for the mentally handicapped in that
estate.
Governor: As I was saying, we faced two problems in providing the facilities that we want. First of all there has been hostility in some parts of the community. Secondly we weren't able to purchase or to provide all the premises that we would have liked in housing estates and we're having to look at whether we should purchase more properties ourselves or build more properties ourselves and we've set aside the capital funds to make that possible. I'm afraid that it's not as simple as just making more funds available. We've actually almost doubled the amount of money available in the last couple of years for the rehabilitation of the severely mentally handicapped and we've increased by about HK$2 billion the total amount available for rehabilitation services as a whole. The difficulty isn't finding the money, the difficulty is spending the money as rapidly and as effectively as we would like but we're looking at how we can do that. We're looking, as I said, at how we can expedite work in Aberdeen and I can assure the Honourable Member, whose concern about this matter I know well, that we'll do everything we can for a group in the community whose needs are well understood by this Council and by others.