LegCo's closure may delay key HK public welfare bills

The LegCo closure will put on hold deliberations on 40 items awaiting funding, most of which affect people’s lives, according to legislator and Finance Committee Chairman Chan Kin-por IItems to be discussed by LegCo’s Finance Committee involve over HK$70 billion (Bt275.65 billion) in appropriations, including issues of public health and public housing, he said.
Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen, president of the Legislative Council, announced the legislature’s temporary closure on Thursday, attributing it to extensive damage to fire safety, security and communication systems inside the council building. The chambers are to remain closed until October, when a new legislative year starts.
While the effect would be to move up the legislature’s summer recess by two weeks, Chan has said he believes that 20 to 30 of those 40 items previously could have been moved out of committee and approved by the legislature before the recess.
Leung visited the complex with members from the LegCo Commission – which oversees the secretarial affairs of the council – before making the announcement. The LegCo building went through a violent break-in on Monday night, with hundreds of masked protesters occupying and vandalizing it for about three hours.
Leung said it is difficult to find a suitable alternative meeting venue, as a fully functioning council needs to accommodate more than 1,000 staff members.
By Thursday evening, Hong Kong police had arrested 12 people accused of involvement in storming the LegCo chambers on Monday. Police said that arrests corresponded with such offences as assaulting a police officer, unlawful assembly and possession of offensive weapons.
Among the 40 items to be scrutinized by the Finance Committee, about 20 deal with city infrastructure of different types, while others concern personnel appointments and government salary adjustments, according to a committee agenda list.
Chan said the matters he considers to be of great urgency and linked to people’s lives include appropriation extensions for several public hospitals and infrastructure projects for public housing. He said he will soon write to LegCo members to see if they would agree to scrutinise urgent livelihood issues through circulation of papers, replacing face-to-face meetings.
That type of special arrangement was once used to allocate funds for the catastrophic Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008, according to Leung.
However, Chan said that if any member on the committee disagrees with such a special arrangement, it can’t be used, according to procedural rules of the committee. In such a scenario, projects for public housing, for instance, would have to be delayed by about four months, until late October.