Published in HKEJ ” Professional Eye” on 24th June 2010
Frankie YAN
The Professional Commons
www.procommons.org.hk
One more life was being taken by a collapsed tree last week! This is again vividly illustrative of the severe problems involving buck-passing in the government. After assumption of his office as the Chief Executive, Donald Tsang reinstated CS and FS’s original portfolios in overseeing and supervising policy bureaux, chairing the Policy Committee, as well as orchestrating the operation of government departments. As far as the reinstated position is concerned, there is a growing expectation that the SAR Government might have been governed smoothly in the sense that cross-departmental policy issues would be much better managed. But seemingly thing doesn’t go like that, as revealed by the livelihood-related issues to be enumerated.
Policy delivery under “leadership void”
The Office of the Ombudsman (hereafter “Ombudsman”) recently released its latest report on direct investigations, suggesting that the complaint against the Transport Department concerning illegal bicycle parking are justified in the sense that “the department concerned had not taken proper action to solve the problem”. It went on saying that the Department, as a “user department”, failed to “discharge its management responsibility”. Besides, what underneath is that the Home Affairs Department was once advised by the Ombudsman to follow up issues concerning bike management under the perspective of street management, including the illegal bike parking at various Public Transport Interchanges.
As a platform designed for effective cross-departmental coordination, the Steering Committee on District Administration (“SCDA”) tried to take the lead to tackle problems concerning illegal bicycle parking. Despite the Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs being the chairman, it is beyond his/her authority to equip the Transport Department with the legal authority and resources to remove illegally parked bicycles. Ironically, via his response to Ombudsman annual report in November 2009, the CS indicated that the Government was acting proactively in order to put Ombudsman’s relevant recommendations into practice, implying his insensitivity toward Transport Department’s resentment and incompetence in playing the mentoring and supervisory role. In the light of this, it is unrealistic to expect the CS might have instructed the Transport and Housing Bureau to help ease the predicament facing the Transport Department.
Grasping the crux of the issue would be of critical importance, in which cross-departmental attempts, as far as we can see, are not able to uproot this nerve-racking problem. However, remedial steps imperative to ameliorate illegal bike problem are restricted to clearance of illegally parked bike through cross-departmental operations, putting in place 300 new parking spaces for bikes; and suffice to say, a consultancy study on innovative parking rack designs is underway in order to boost parking capacity only. Against this background, it is highly likely that problems of similar nature might recur, because the core of the problem including inadequate parking spaces, their inconvenient locations and rampant theft occurrence still remain intact. More importantly, as the biggest landlord in the territory, the Housing Authority has not been invited by the SCDA to help address this problem.
Retract when encountering difficulties: “Boss left leaves tea unattended”
The second example revolves around the Integrated Call Centre (“ICC” or namely “1823 Government Hotline”, hereafter “the Centre”). The Ombudsman launched two direct investigations in 2003 and ’07 respectively. One important comment against the ICC was that the Centre failed to cover all the governmental departments, which deviated from its ultimate goal to replace the myriads of departmental hotlines.
Personal reshuffle seems to be the major reason why the Efficiency Unit (“EU”) failed to expand the ICC service. It is noteworthy that the Centre is under EU’s leadership and management, where the “direct boss” of its head is the Chief Secretary for Administration. When Donald Tsang left his post as the CS and ascended the Chief Executive in 2005, his successor Rafael Hui only followed the routine, resulting in the suspension of expansion in terms of the number of participating departments. As regards Hui’s successor, the incumbent CS Henry Tang even put this in a regressive manner by narrowing ICC’s purview, including removing the word “Integrated” from its name, revising its service visions and missions, and no longer using the wording “Government Hotline” on government website.
Another example of failure is the joint-office being established to deal with problems in relation to water seepage. The idea was, via joint operations amongst Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and Buildings Department, to effectively locate the source of various water seepage problems, therefore agree on the department(s) held responsible for the sake of enhancing efficiency regarding case processing, and subsequently reducing the number of complaints. Despite this, the performance of the office was far from satisfactory and eventually incurred Ombudsman’s direct investigation. In response to the Ombudsman’s investigation results and recommendations, the office shrank its scope on complaints by ruling out those cases out of the confines of designated ordinances. By applying this new definition, statistics shows a marked decline in the number of complaints, indicative of a no-brainer towards accomplishment of policy objectives. But poorly, citizens beset by water seepage problem are therefore stranded and have to take care of their wellbeing.
Priceless lives in exchange for no learnt lesson
Last year, there was a tragedy in which a passerby was crushed to death by a collapsed tree. To respond, the CS had headed a cross-departmental task force to formulate a holistic policy and appointed officials to oversee relevant policy measures. Moreover, two designated offices had been formed to take charge of tree management and greening matters. Government effort has brought about substantial results, despite still plenty of room for improvement. As we can see, should there be any positive result in policy imperatives, it is largely dependent on government’s determination. The latest tree collapse incident happened in Yuen Chau Kok Shatin, another wake-up call in a midst of many similar ones beforehand, suggests that the Government failed to spend enough effort to get to the bottom of respective problem.
In addition, latent fire problem resulting from unauthorized extension of buildings is such an issue being raised from time to time whenever serious fire accidents happen. Severe air quality problem has reportedly led to the premature death of several hundred people every year. Illegal dumping of construction waste has been rampant without a single sign of relief, and last but not least, thousands of people lives are always under threat in the advent of rainfall season. As revealed by these cases, it seems ostensibly that the lack of cross-departmental coordination is meant to take the blame. Nevertheless, when fathoming the issue further, it must be senior official’s perfunctory attitude, as well as their ostrich-like will of governance, that actually mess the whole thing up.
As far as the bureaucratic hierarchy is concerned, both CS and FS have an important role to play, which is to ensure cross-departmental coordination in the level of policy formulation and implementation. It is highlighted on CS’s official website that the role of CS “is particularly important in areas which cut across policy bureaux”. In the light of this, there will be no point in confusing who must be held responsible for the mess arising from dysfunctional cross-departmental coordination.
June 22, 2010
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