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Political appointments have become a failed effort to meet discarded objectives

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Did you notice the odd thing about the two latest appointments to the upper ranks of the government? Both the two women appointed to secretarial posts were career civil servants, who were recruited to the Administrative Officer ranks in (coincidentally) 1989.

This is not quite the way these things were supposed to work. Before 2002 all secretaries (that is, heads of bureaus, not word processors) were career civil servants who had worked their way up the bureaucratic pyramid.

In that year the then Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, introduced what was then called the Principal Officials Accountability System, under which heads of bureaus would be appointed, not by the existing promotion mechanism from within the civil service, but instead by him, from outside it.

These people would fill Exco (which roughly corresponds to the Cabinet, in the US system), and would be answerable to the CE who appointed them. They would not be on civil service terms and their appointments would expire at the end of the CE’s term of office.

There was little public discussion before this brainwave was launched on us, so there remains a good deal of ambiguity about what it was intended to achieve. What you might call the “realist” interpretation was that Mr Tung believed the traditional civil service was not responding to his wishes and instructions as enthusiastically as he might wish.

There may have been something in this. Mr Tung’s background as the patriarch of a family shipping company was perhaps a poor preparation for dealing with civil servants who were used to being given a task and then being left to sort out the implementation by themselves.

The “idealist” interpretation was that the new system would subject the administration of Hong Kong to more critical appraisal and monitoring. The new secretaries would be ostensibly political creatures who could deal with Legco, explain the policies they were pursuing in public, and could be dismissed if they erred.

Even in its earliest incarnation this system did not live up to expectations, whether realist or idealistic. Having an obedient Exco did not help Mr Tung’s problems in government, and three years later he resigned with diplomatic health problems.

The new secretaries proved not unlike their predecessors. Even in the first batch there were five civil servants. The government’s relations with Legco became more contentious as it aligned itself explicitly with the DAB and Civic Party against the others.

“Accountability” did not ensue. The CE was reluctant to admit an appointment was a mistake and appointees were reluctant to resign. Secretaries who had committed egregious blunders were hounded from office by public opinion, more or less as they always had been.

In 2008 the system was renamed and extended by the next Chief Executive, Donald Tsang. Under the new “Political Appointments System” the existing secretaries were reinforced with undersecretaries and assistants. Launching the innovation the then Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland stuff said the existing secretaries would continue to study and design government policies in conjunction with the Permanent Secretary (senior mainstream civil servant) of their bureaus. The new deputies would liaise with legislators and provide policy input. The assistants would help bureau chiefs to reach out to the community.

Officials also said the new system would preserve a “permanent, professional and politically neutral civil service”, while nurturing talent which would be needed for the introduction of universal suffrage, then considered a likely future prospect.

The two new layers of appointees, with the associated fleets of drivers and personal secretaries, would cost $60 million a year.

Which brings us to the outstanding question. Now that this scheme has demonstrably failed, and many of the objectives which motivated it have been abandoned, would it not be a good idea to save a lot of money by abandoning the whole thing?

The system has not succeeded in introducing a wave of talented outsiders to the top of the administration. There are now 15 secretaries, of whom nine are career civil servants. Three of the others came from government-funded hospital or school backgrounds and one is an apparatchik of the FTU, the pro-government simulated trade union. There are only two genuine outsiders.

Since we no longer aspire to political pluralism the idea of a politically neutral civil service has become meaningless, and indeed civil servants are no longer expected, according to the latest version of their code, to be impartial and objective. Chief Executives have many problems, but passive resistance from the civil service is clearly not one of them.

The system has not nurtured any conspicuous political talents, and indeed the selectors now appear to prefer to seek candidates for office in the upper ranks of the police. There is no need for an extensive herd of specialists to liaise with Legco, which is expected to do as it is told, as indeed is the general public.

In these straitened times the Political Appointment System is, at best, an unaffordable luxury. At worst, an expensive attempt to put lipstick on a political pig?

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Civil service numbers suggest our happiness may have been exaggerated

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The finer points of civil servant staffing are not usually a hot news topic. But the latest grim update from the Civil Service Bureau was eagerly covered by both English-language newspapers. This may have been an effort to avoid the alternative story offered the same day about civil service dismissals.

But it was not surprising that different reporters made different choices. The “source” was the Civil Service Bureau’s written replies to questions from legislators in response to the budget speech. These were all published on the same day, involved a great deal of repetition and ran to no less than 362 pages.

Having browsed in this heap of information I think I would have gone for the dismissals as being more interesting. The leading reasons for dismissal from the civil service in the last five years were:

  • Failure to get a COVID vaccination (21 cases)
  • Absence/lateness (20)
  • Shoplifting/theft (18)
  • Sex-related offences (14)

Offences against public order and other protest-related peccadilloes only amounted to six. My personal favourite category was “Others (e.g. illegal gambling, perverting the course of justice, computer-related offences, murder etc)”. It is nice to know that murder is grounds for dismissal, though other punishments are probably more salient to the criminal concerned.

However, to the grim news. This was that, as the Standard put it, “The bureau said on Friday that the number of departures in the civil service increased from over 8,500 people in the year 2018-2019 to over 10,100 people in the year 2022-2023. Among them, nearly 1,000 people were under 30, and almost 3,000 had less than ten years of service.”

This might lead the careless reader to think that civil servants were heading for the nearest exit in droves. Hong Kong has about 160,000 civil servants and the normal length of service for a graduate entrant would be something over 30 years. So you would in normal circumstances expect about 5,000 people a year to leave simply because they have reached the retirement age.

And unless I have completely misunderstood the Civil Service bureau’s tables, that is roughly what happens. More than half of the 10,000 “departures” were because of “retirement” (5,918 out of 10,126 in 2022-3). The category which we should be worrying about is “resignation”, which is much lower but rising (1,863 in 2020-21, 3,863 in 2022-23).

And the worrying thing about this is that if you look at the departures broken down by age groups the figures for 20-50 total 3,479, nearly half of whom are in the 30-40 bracket. There must be at least a suspicion that many of these comparatively young professionals are not just leaving the civil service, but Hong Kong as well.

This in turn suggests that official estimates of the level of happiness produced by recent changes have been somewhat exaggerated.

This is rather born out by the figures for individual departments. The two which are particularly beset by a large number of unfilled vacancies are RTHK and the Police Force.

RTHK had the highest vacancy rate of any government department, at 24 per cent. No wonder they have robots reading the weather bulletin. Indeed, looking at their news output there is clearly a wider role for Artificial Intelligence. Even a dumb computer can rewrite government press releases, which seem to be the favoured news source these days.

The highest absolute number of vacancies is in the police force. The force had 1,180 resignations last year which, looking on the bright side, was lower than the record high of 1,802 recorded in 2019-20.

It appears, unsurprisingly, that life in the force since 2019 has changed, and the arrival of national security and peaceful streets has produced further different changes, leaving quite a lot of police folk feeling that the new lifestyle is not what they signed up for.

In particular the force is, alas, no longer held in the high levels of public esteem to which it believed itself to be accustomed and entitled. It has a large and efficient public relations organisation. But expecting adroit reputation management to obliterate painful real-world memories involving tear gas and pepper spray is to ask more than public relations can deliver.

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Time for the Director of Audit to stick to his knitting?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2024| 1 Comment »

Regular readers will recall that a couple of months ago I complained that the Director of Audit had devoted the resources of his department to some nit-picking criticisms of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I thought there was a danger that this might look like a contribution to the general barrage of abuse from government-friendly quarters which had led to the departure of the university’s vice chancellor.

However it appears from the director’s annual report that this is not what is going on at all. What is going on is a violation not of the separation of powers but of an even older principle: the division of labour.

The Director of Audit, Nelson Lam Chi-yuen, is not a career civil servant. Before he was appointed to his present post by Carrie Lam in 2022 he was an accountant, his political experience limited to membership of the usual sort of consultative bodies and six months on the Legislative Council.

This may explain why he apparently supposes that senior civil servants are free to devote themselves to whatever work they think might be important and interesting, regardless of whether this is their appointed function, or whether it may in fact be someone else’s.

Mr Lam devoted a quarter of his annual report to his efforts to improve the protection of national security, including his farcical foray into the Chinese University. He is reported as complaining, in a newspaper interview, that “government departments and other public organisations either failed to prioritise the national security law or did not fully comply with the government’s requirements.”

“These departments and organisations are at risk of violating the law,” he said.

It seems I am not the only scribe who thought that Mr Lam’s self-appointment as a sort of national security Witchfinder General was straying a bit off-piste, as it were. Why, he was asked at the inevitable press conference, was his department no longer keeping its traditional focus on an audited body’s proper and effective use of money?

His reply deserved quoting in full: “Efficiency and effectiveness refers to whether the audited body abided by the law or not. If they have failed to do so that means they are doing a poor job. If they have broken the law, that would also involve money,” Lam said.

Which of course is rubbish. It is perfectly possible to impair national security without involving money. Effective spending of money is not the same thing as abiding by the law. And ineffective spending may be perfectly legal. Contrariwise there are many things which will eventually involve money if left unchecked, which we do not expect auditors to explore. If the drains in the Central Government Offices are blocked it will eventually cost money; we do not on that account expect the Director of Audit to explore the official sewers.

There are already elaborate mechanisms in place to ensure that government departments and public bodies accord appropriate attention to national security and obey the relevant laws. We have national security police, our shy guardians from over the boundary, the Secretaries for Security and Justice, and so on.

Mr Lam’s formulation that departments and organisations are “at risk” of breaking the law tells us, and should tell him, that he should be leaving law enforcement to police people and lawyers who will have a better idea of whether the risk is real or imagined.

The flip side of the Director of Audit developing a new national security hobby is that it will reduce the resources devoted to his proper function, which is ensuring that government spending is honest and effective.

Nobody else has the knowledge, experience and powers to do this job properly. Amateur observers have no right to extract answers from recalcitrant departments, and potential whistleblowers in the civil service may well be restrained by the thought that whistleblowing is rarely a good career move.

Mr Lam’s innovation in this area is the idea that “not everything has to be audited at once”, so any new policy will be given a few years before it is audited. By which time, surely, it will be too late to do anything about it?

An unintended light on the new approach was shone by Mr Lam’s concluding remark that “the Audit Commission is not trying to pick on the government’s mistake, but trying to step up the government’s accountability and service quality.”

Well perhaps it would be a good idea if someone in the government was trying to “pick on the government’s mistake”, because critics from outside it are “at risk” of breaking the law, as Mr Lam might put it.

And some errors become evident long before a few years have passed. The West Kowloon Cultural District, for example, is tottering towards bankruptcy because its two big museums operate at a loss, as museums generally do, and no arrangement has been made yet to fill in the resulting financial gap.

There is talk of an MTR-like solution, in which the cultural district will go into the business of developing expensive flats. This raises an interesting question. Allowing rail companies to develop the land over and around their stations is justified as allowing the rail operator to share in the extra wealth that it generates when it opens a station. Whether this is an acceptable way of financing a cultural district is perhaps a different matter.

Then if Mr Lam is not too busy he might look at the Express Rail link. It seems most of the travellers on this wonderful innovation are only going to and from stations in nearby Shenzhen, for which purpose a high-speed rail link is inappropriate and ludicrously expensive.

No doubt readers will be able to think of other items which are more worthy of Mr Lam’s sleuthing skills than the Chinese University bookshop. Directors of Audit have traditionally had a high degree of freedom to pursue whatever issue attracts their attention. But freedom, as we are so often reminded these days, has limits.

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