Antidote to a life on welfare?
Hong Kong has a hard core of able-bodied people on welfare. Two-thirds of them have been receiving handouts for two years or more, and half - about 20,000 people - for over three. They have given up looking for jobs, and include some younger people who have never worked.
Last week, the government hosted a conference on a possible way to ease this problem: social enterprises. These are not charities, but businesses run partly for social ends rather than purely for profit. They can therefore find market niches that commercial companies cannot, or will not, fill. They can offer jobless people opportunities to get work, obtain training and gain experience, skills and self-confidence.
In Britain, there are about 15,000 social enterprises employing over 500,000 people with a combined turnover of around GBP18 billion ($243 billion). They include a magazine whose distributors are all homeless, a chain of restaurants that trains disadvantaged young people, and a wide range of housing, transport, recycling, small-scale farming and other activities.
Here in Hong Kong, we have only a few dozen social enterprises - in cleaning, personal care, domestic help, business services and recycling, for example. Can the sector expand here?
In Britain, expansion was a bottom-up process, with voluntary, neighbourhood and other groups and individuals slowly developing enterprises all over the country. In Hong Kong, we don't seem to have that tradition of a local, neighbourhood-level initiative. We have come from a very top-down, colonial system of administration. And our people were originally refugees whose instinct was to look after themselves first. We now seem to have an assumption that you can leave all community issues to the government or somebody else, and we have a large bureaucracy that is happy to put itself in charge.
Nor do we have different local governments trying out their own ideas. Maybe we should look at this as part of district council reform, later this year.
Another hurdle for social enterprise is that life in Hong Kong is tough for small enterprises generally. Despite our reputation as a free economy, there are licensing regimes, restrictions on building use, health and safety rules and dozens of other ways we hinder economic activity and job creation. There are often good reasons for them, but we should take a good look at their costs and benefits. Further, we have an economic structure that favours bigger conglomerates and raises questions about a lack of competition.
We also lack a tradition of business involvement in grass-roots affairs. Social enterprises must be market-driven and professionally managed. In Britain, many of them are run by retired, often high-powered, businessmen who don't mind rolling up their sleeves and applying their talents in the community.
As for money, social enterprises are supposed to be self-sustaining. In theory, you could justify a public subsidy as seed money if it paid for itself through cost savings to the taxpayer - for example, by taking people off welfare. But public aid must not allow social enterprises to compete unfairly with commercial operations. Ultimately, social enterprise is about independence from government. If the idea takes off in Hong Kong, it will be due to the efforts of neighbourhood, welfare and other community groups and individuals.
That way of thinking involves a break with the past. Our whole social-welfare system discourages self-reliance. Families in need have little or no freedom of choice, and none of the responsibilities that come with making choices. Welfare agencies have become more and more dependent on government over the years.
If sections of the community have lost their self-reliance, it is because the government, with the best of intentions, has taken it away. Could social enterprise help to give it back?
Bernard Chan is a member of the Executive Council and a legislator representing the insurance functional constituency
