SENIOR civil servants have asked for bigger housing allowances to catch up with spiralling property prices.
The call was made in response to a government proposal to limit future increases in housing allowance to the inflation rate.
The proposal is contained in a consultative paper to be distributed to government departments today.
It recommends raising the cash allowance under the Home Finance Scheme - unchanged since 1990 - by 35 per cent but limits future annual adjustments to the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (A).
The vice-chairman for the Senior Non-Expatriate Officers Association, Alex Au Chi-keung, said: ''The proposal has failed to take into account the market movement, as the 35 per cent increase can't match the increases in property prices in the past few years.'' The vice-chairman for the Association of Expatriate Civil Servants, Barry Brown, said they were disappointed. ''The property market has no correlation with the inflation rate.'' It is also proposed that the application period for the scheme be limited to August and September this year.
Mr Au said the restriction would limit their choice in times of high property prices and might lead to inflation by pushing all the new participants to buy their flats within two months.
