- 7-
The Home Affairs Department is mainly responsible for monitoring and assessing the services and for identifying what services are most needed. We have established a Steering Committee, chaired by the Director of Home Affairs, and including all those within Government responsible for service provision. We know that a number of non-government organisations are also very active in this area. For this reason, the Steering Committee will be inviting their participation at future meetings. The Steering Committee is responsible for identifying areas of need and recommending measures to service providers to address those needs. Although still in the early days of its work, the Committee will be making recommendations to service providers to ask for additional resources where there is a need.
The work of the Steering Committee is complemented and supported by a similar set-up in each of the Home Affairs Department's 18 District Offices. Through the district liaison network and frequent contacts with local associations and residents, District Officers are ideally placed to identify problem areas early and to reflect these difficulties to the central Steering Committee where they can be addressed at a senior level. District Officers are starting this work on a number of fronts. For example, the Wong Tai Sin District Office has initiated a local survey of new residents in an effort to pinpoint their needs, while the Sham Shui Po District Office is organising a district seminar on the subject. In addition, the Director of Home Affairs and her colleagues pay frequent visits to centres offering services for new arrivals. These visits are useful in understanding the feelings and needs of the new arrivals, and in gathering views from service providers directly.
In order to establish effective communication with new arrivals, it is necessary for us to have in hand more precisely their personal information. To this end, the Home Affairs Department has arranged with the Immigration Department to invite those newly arrived from China to fill in a simple survey form when they apply for their identity cards after landing in Hong Kong, supplying information on their age, details about their children, the dialects they speak, and the district in which they have settled. This information will be useful in allowing Home Affairs Department to assess the social, educational, housing and welfare needs of new arrivals. By identifying the areas in which new arrivals live, we can also take account of differing requirements across districts in order that service providers can focus their efforts accordingly. We have undertaken a pilot test of the survey in December and, having made a number of refinements and improvements, expect to begin the full survey in the coming months.