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The responsibility for planning and development, and for the administration of subventions, will remain with the Social Welfare Department Headquarters and will not be regionalized. I see no reason, therefore, why agencies

should make any change to their existing planning machinery. Once this point has been understood, Dr. Ho's fears that agencies may lose control

of their branch offices can be seen to be unfounded.

After regionalization, the Regional Social Welfare Officers will,

of course, liaise closely with the voluntary agencies operating in their Regions. They will be responsible for ensuring that there is no unnecessary overlap in the services provided by Government and the voluntary sector, and for identifying new service areas, At a lower level, there will be staff in each district office who are specifically responsible for liaison

and evaluation work in various fields. I would like to clarify this word

'evaluation', for I think that it is this aspect that is of particular

concern to my honourable friend, and indeed to others in the voluntary

sector. In the current financial year, the Government has budgetted $100 mil-

lion for social welfare subventions. This is an increase of almost 100%

over the last two years, and there can be no doubt that the rate of

increase in the future will also be considerable because of our new plans

in social welfare. It is the responsibility of the Social Welfare Depart-

ment to make sure that this money is properly spent, and I am certain that

members of this Council and indeed the public would not wish it otherwise.

Procedures already exist for the assessment and evaluation of the services

provided by subvented agencies. As I have explained, the administration

of subventions will continue to be centralized. The main change in the

future will be that reports made on individual voluntary centres by liaison

staff in the field will be channelled through Regional Officers rather than,

as now, through Divisional Heads in Headquarters. In other words, after

regionalization we shall be able to monitor more effectively the use that

voluntary agencies make of funds that are provided by the Government, but there is nothing in the regionalization scheme itself that will undermine the very valuable partnership that exists at present between the Government

and the voluntary sector.

Dr. Ho's last comment on the subject of regionalization was to

ask how the boundaries for the 4 Regions and 11 Districts had been determined. The answer is very simple. The districts have been based on the administra-

tive districts into which the urban areas and the New Territories are divided.