XN000022-1996-03-06 — Page 115

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Reply:

Mr President.

Processing time may refer to waiting time, which is the standard used in our performance pledge, or time required to process each transaction. I shall include both references in my reply.

(a)

(b)

(c)

The average time required to clear the immigration procedure for each visitor at the airport is 90 seconds on arrival and 50 seconds on departure. During the months of November and December 1995 and January 1996, on average 92% of arriving visitors were cleared within the target waiting time of 30 minutes. For departing passengers, our performances has consistently been close to 100%.

We have approached to the Japanese and Singaporean Authorities to obtain the information, which is still not available at the time this reply is issued. We will separately provide the information to the Council when it is available.

The Government is committed to providing an efficient immigration clearance service to facilitate ease of travel by overseas visitors to Flong Kong. In September 1995, the Immigration Department implemented a new computer system to process machine readable passports by optical scanners. This results in a reduction of 20 seconds of the time required for each transaction involving a machine readable passport. Apart from the transaction time, we have also taken steps to reduce the overall waiting time of visitors. At the airport, we have taken the following improvement measures:

(i) the addition of 51 staff to increase the number of counters from

116 to 128:

(ii)

adjustment of the roster and staggering meal breaks of counter staff over a longer period to maximise the number of counters that can be manned at any one time;

(iii) implementation of single queuing arrangement at the departure

level in the near future;