XN000022-1996-07-04 — Page 11

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Mr Law Chi-kwong (in Chinese): Mr Governor, just now you said there are 4,200 civil servants in the government who are disabled but actually about 950 of them are colour-blind and usually we would not include colour-blind people under the category of disabled. So, actually, if we take that out only about 2% or less than 2% of the civil servants are disabled persons. I would like to know whether you have any plans to set an employment target, for example 4% or 5% of the civil service to be filled up by people with a disability? And I would also like to know whether you are going to request or direct statutory bodies or subvented organisations to set a similar employment target?

Governor: Let me be helpful straight away to the honourable gentleman. We have been asked this question so many times before that the Secretary for the Civil Service has decided we will put ourselves in the position in which we no longer have to answer it next year. So, we are going to redefine the figures and we are going to take out those who are colour-blind and set a new and appropriate target.

But let me tell the honourable gentleman what the consequence of that is. At present there are 70 grades in the civil Service where you need to have the ability to distinguish between colours. Some of those grades are obvious, for example the Fire Service - and not just to see the red fire-engines. If you take out the number of people employed in those grades from the total number of civil servants, and if you then take away from the figure of those civil servants with a disability those whose disability is colour-blindness, the proportion of disabled civil servants in the figure that is left goes up not down. So in a sense the government's position in percentage terms looks better if we remove the figure for those with the impairment that the honourable gentleman mentioned, an impairment which and I won't embarrass him is shared by one of the honourable gentleman's honourable friends.

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So we will, from next year, present the figures differently. We will give an aggregate figure which includes those with a colour-blindness but we will give a separate figure removing both the grades which need full colour on the one hand and those among the disabled with colour-blindness too. And then we will have to set ourselves on the basis of that new baseline, we will have to set ourselves a new and higher target year on year. This year we did rather better than our target and I hope we can do so in the future.

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I am loathe to direct bodies outside government but we have encouraged bodies outside government to pursue the same sort of employment policy that we have been following, and some the Housing Authority is a case in point - have done pretty well in providing opportunities for people with a disability and we are very grateful to them. But I do think that if you set up organisations to run a sector of public administration you should be a little bit careful about how many things you direct them to do.