PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
all we are likely to get in the next six months is a modest improvement in workers' compensation. This is, I think you will agree, entirely inadequate to the scale of the problem which is to bring about, with something approaching the speed and determination which Hong Kong has shown in so many other directions, improvements both in labour standards and industrial relations. The existing process for dealing with these matters operates with painful slowness and we all attach great importance, therefore, to the establishment of a Labour Policy Committee whose object would be speeding up decisions on labour policy and maintaining a close oversight of the progress of projected labour legislation at all stages. I appreciate that the senior members of the Secretariat who will form the nucleus of the Committee are already heavily burdened but it is precisely the need to lift these labour matters out of the mainstream of day to day work that the proposed Labour Policy Committee is intended to deal with.
Social Security
The Governor has expressed publicly in Hong Kong his interest in some advance being made on the social security front; but apart from the pending publication of the Working Party's report nothing is likely to happen for some months at least. Would it not be helpful, as Foggon proposes, to have the report of what, with all due respect was a working party of non-specialists, examined quietly on the spot by someone with specialised experience? We have in mind someone from our Ministry of Social Security who has had experience of social security problems in less developed countries. The Secretary of State has rightly pointed out that the person appointed must have his feet firmly on the ground and not his head in the
clouds.
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One final point on labour. My concern about labour conditions and reform is tempered by the realisation of the
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
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