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.
