TNAG-0573-FCO40-706-Monitoring-of-progress-made-on-planning-paper-on-Hong-Kong-1976 — Page 174

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SOCIAL WELFARE

Review of Social Welfare in Cash and Services

We are conducting a major review of our social welfare programmes. They fall into three main categories. First there are cash payments, based on need, called Public Assistance. These are intended to ensure that in all reasonable

circumstances incomes are maintained above the subsistence level. Second, there

are other cash payments called Disability and Infirmity Allowances. These are not based on need but on proved conditions of disability or age, and are intended to provide a small pension to help the disabled and elderly to live in the community and reduce the burden on their families. These cash payments take up 70% of expenditure on social welfare. There is also a third category of programmes which relate not to payments but to services. On these your Government is preparing costed programme plans covering the major fields of services to the handicapped, the elderly and youth. That on services to the handicapped, that is to say on rehabilitation services, is being published next week. That on services to the elderly should be ready early next year; while that on preventive services for

youth should be ready by the late spring or early summer.

Once we have these plans we will undertake as a matter of priority a comprehensive review of what needs doing to complete the safety net for our society and make sure it has no holes. Current arrangements for payments are an enormous advance on the dry rations of six years ago. But now that the administrative machinery has been run in, we should look closely at how well it really works; at whether methods of proving need for Public Assistance are reasonable, at whether the levels of payments are appropriate and criteria for eligibility including for instance the age for infirmity allowance, are right; in short at whether our arrangements cover properly the vulnerable groups the community wishes to help; and if not what adjustments would be necessary. We intend to combine the conclusions of the reviews of payments and of services in an amended and more comprehensive and specific Social Welfare Programme, which we intend should be ready by about the end of 1977, and subject to the views of Hon. Members, begin to be imple- mented in 1978.