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Dick KWOK
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Being invited by Hon LegCo Member, Sr Tony Tse, I recently joined his new Property & Facility Management Working Committee. The Working Committee is led and chaired by Tony and counts six members who are property and facility management professionals and key stakeholders. The main objectives of this committee are to give advice on issues like the future bills on licensing property management companies and practitioners, general building management and building safety-related regulations and implementation, etc. The Committee will meet at least once a month and hopes to establish a strong platform for communicating and expressing the opinions of surveying practitioners, which will be heard by the government in the course of the making and implementation of its policies. I personally appreciate the effort made by Tony in this respect and am fully committed to serving and voicing the views of our fellow PFM surveyors on all concerned issues. In fact, after the first working committee meeting in March, some of our opinions have already been adduced to the government via the enquiries made by Tony in LegCo. I will keep members updated of the latest developments in due course.
On 27 March, I joined a reception led by the HKIS’s Planning and Development Division (PDD) with guests from the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong-Shanghai Economic Development Association. Both the Secretary-General and Deputy Director of the United Front Department and Liaison Office United Front Work Department were kind enough to hear the PDD’s updated briefing on the progress of the mutual recognition of professionals under the CEPA arrangement. I also took this opportunity to express our intention to meet our counterpart institutions in Shanghai and sought their assistance in pursuing our first visit to Shanghai. I received positive feedback from the Secretary-General, Mr. Li Qun Ce, who kindly agreed to follow up on the coordination work.
The Hong Kong Coalition of Professional Services organized a luncheon for 10 April and invited Mrs. Carrie Lam, Chief Secretary for Administration, HKSAR, as the Guest of Honour. I joined this luncheon with other OBs and Divisional Chairmen of the HKIS. Mrs. Lam presented the government’s initiatives on how to tackle poverty in Hong Kong with detailed data and figures to substantiate its course of action. She further explained in depth he proposed setup of an official poverty line and the main purpose of utilizing it as a means of policy planning, especially on the allocation of welfare resources. It was a very fruitful and interesting briefing.
Thanks to our guest speaker, Ir Ken Lee, Senior Engineer, Highways Department, who delivered an interesting presentation on the HK-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge project – a major piece of cross-broader infrastructure for the next decade. This event was well-received by the 104 members in attendance. |
