Opinion | It’s Hong Kong officials who need to work harder to tackle poverty, not those already in dire straits

The ‘Strive and Rise’ scheme, taken from the chief executive’s manifesto, fails to address the underlying causes of poverty

The poverty trap is exacerbated by our widening wealth gap, inadequate support for working families and single parents, and the rising cost of living

Reading Time:3 minutes

Chief Executive John Lee (second right) visits residents of a subdivided flat in Sham Shui Po on July 30. Lee and other chief executives have made pledges to tackle poverty in the city, but the wealth gap has continued to grow. Photo: Handout

Published: 6:45am, 12 Sep 2022

It has been less than 100 days since Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu took the helm, so what should Hong Kong expect from his first policy address? Perhaps he could elaborate on his election manifesto, which has been criticised for being too vague and lacking detail.

Lee seems eager to start checking items off his list. Take the recent publicity surrounding the “Strive and Rise Programme”, for example. It’s lifted straight from one of Lee’s leading policies in his election manifesto: tackle intergenerational poverty.

Chief Secretary Eric Chan Kwok-ki, who is leading the programme, went one better. He doubled the size of the scheme to cover 2,000 junior secondary school students living in subdivided flats, instead of the 1,000 students Lee mentioned when running for the top job.

But criticism of the pilot scheme remains the same. While the subsidy, mentorship, life planning and exposure to the arts and culture are nice, they do nothing to tackle the problem.

That problem – the poverty trap – is complex. It is exacerbated by the city’s ever-widening wealth gap, inadequate support for working families and single parents, and the rising cost of living, of which unaffordable housing is a huge part. We have searched for generations but have yet to find ways to effectively address these contributing factors.

All of that feeds into the dire reality that almost one in four people live below the poverty line, according to the 2020 Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report. The study found there were more than 274,000 poor children in the city – a poverty rate of 27 per cent. And if that is not alarming enough, consider the more than 50 per cent jump which that figure represents, compared to the 180,000 children found living in poverty in 2015.