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Just let me though explain to the Honourable gentleman what the position is and put it in context. First of all, we're not arguing that treatment has to be a monopoly of one or two providers. We've just announced that we'll be subventing two substantial projects by Caritas and by the Hong Kong Christian Service to provide residential treatment for drug abusers and to provide a counselling service for psychotropic drug abusers. We've also been providing more assistance for the groups who decided, I think regrettably, (to boycott) that particular summit meeting. What are we doing? Well, we've clarified the arrangements on CSSA's for them. After I'd been to one of the centres that they run and heard from them first hand about their difficulties in funding education for young abusers, we've now made available a block grant which I think in the last few months of last year cost us about just over $2 million for funding education and I think in a full year will cost about $7.5 million. We also offered them at the meeting we held with them the other day, just over $3 million to develop their counselling services to employ more social workers and we said beyond that that we would like in a genuine way, in a positive way, to consider the case for subvention but we couldn't do that without a proper assessment. If we were to provide subvention without assessment, I'm pretty sure myself that sooner or later the Finance Committee of this Council would have a word or two to say about it. What we explained to them was that an assessment wasn't a way of putting off helping them, that we would carry through an assessment as rapidly as we possibly could but that we wanted to have a proper job done. So I think the sooner we can get on with that the better. I want to see our relationship with them develop and broaden over the coming years. I think they have an extremely important part to play in the rehabilitation and treatment of drug abusers. As the Honourable gentleman will know, after an increase of about 250 per cent in the number of young drug abusers from 1990-94, we saw last year, for the first time in a long period, an actual fall in the number of young drug abusers and in particular a 27 per cent decline in the number of newly reported drug abusers. So we've started. It's no reason for complacency. We've started to see some slightly better figures and we've got to make the figures even better and those Christian organisations can play a very substantial role in that work and I hope will do so.
Mr James To (in Chinese): I hope the Governor can consider this, please speed up the assessment because this thing has been prolonged for many years. If you wait until October next year, it's not too good. Perhaps I will try my best to persuade them not to boycott the summit but perhaps they will boycott the small subsidy.
Governor: Well, I hope the Honourable gentleman will be able to persuade them to get into a helpful dialogue with us. It's in everybody's interests, not least theirs that we work together. We're genuine in wanting to do so but I think we're sensible to believe that there has to be a proper assessment for them as non-governmental organisations just as there would have to be for anybody else.
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