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Secretary for the Treasury speaks on serving the community

The Secretary for the Treasury, Mr K C Kwong, said today (Friday) that the Government was changing its culture with the introduction of a caring touch in serving the community.

Speaking at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants' Annual Dinner, Mr Kwong said the Government had spent considerable time over the past few years developing a serving the community programme and focusing on improving service to the community.

He said the aim of the programme was to foster stability and prosperity, improve the quality of life of the whole community, care for those who need help, protect the rights and freedoms of the individual, maintain the rule of law, and encourage people to play their part in their community.

"Since the services we deliver are public services and involve spending public money, the community expects us to provide services in a proper and ethical way. Therefore, we have developed a number of common values which include propriety, integrity, efficiency, and openness," he said.

The Government had identified four core principles in order to turn the aims into reality. These were: accountability, living within our means, managing for performance, and developing our culture of service, he added.

"All departments have now introduced performance pledges setting out in very clear terms the level of service the community can expect from many thousands of different types of services and transactions that the Government provides on a daily basis," he said.

"It has become apparent that the business community's needs are more specific and we must focus more on these to enable this sector to remain competitive and continue to play its major role in generating the wealth that sustains the community as a whole."

It was with this in mind that the Financial Secretary announced a 'helping business' programme in his budget speech, Mr Kwong said.

The programme has set the aim to cut red tape and eliminate over regulation, to reduce the cost of compliance and enforcement whenever possible, to transfer services out of the public sector to the business sector, and to improve existing services or introduce new services in response to reasonable demands from the business sector.