The Hong Kong government will release a new framework to define poverty after failing to release the number of poor households in the city for two consecutive years.
Chris Sun, the labour and social welfare chief, said on Commercial Radio on Sunday that authorities were working on a new index to measure poverty, which would focus on three groups – the elderly, single-parent families and people living in subdivided flats.
Attention will be paid to their employment status, income, rent and living environment. Sun said authorities would roll out policies to relieve poverty according to the new index.
In 2012, then-chief executive Leung Chun-ying re-established a Commission on Poverty (CoP), which launched the city’s first official poverty line in September 2013.
According to the poverty line, any household with less than 50 per cent of the median monthly household income before tax and welfare transfers is considered to be living in poverty. In 2012, there were 1.31 million people living in poverty in Hong Kong.
However, the CoP stopped releasing its annual poverty report in 2022.
Sing Tao Daily reported in December 2022 that CoP’s last meeting of the year was abruptly cancelled.
According to its last report, published in 2021, the number of people living below the poverty line had risen to 1.65 million, marking a 26.3 per cent poverty rate.
When asked on Sunday whether authorities would release number of poor households in the future, Sun said that it was not appropriate to assess poverty with a single index.
“Poverty involved many dimensions. If we only look at relative income, it’s like only looking at BMI (Body Mass Index) [to assess one’s health], when we should also check blood pressure and its physical condition,” Sun said in Cantonese.
Wealth gap
Sze Lai-shan, deputy director of the Society for Community Organisation and a member of CoP, said on Commercial Radio on Sunday that she welcomed authorities’ move to study the needs of specific groups but added it was also necessary to release number of poor households regularly.
“The total number [of poor households] informs us of the general situation and helps us set better policies to relieve poverty,” Sze said in Cantonese.
According to Oxfam’s povertyreport in 2023, the city’s wealth gap widened after the pandemic, with the city’s poorest making 57.7 times less than the richest in the first quarter of 2023.
The NGO said that based on analysis of data from Census and Statistics Department, there were 1.36 million people living in poverty in the first quarter of 2023.
Help safeguard press freedom & keep HKFP free for all readers by supporting our team
