Enhancing Service Culture

141. The entire Government has the responsibility to respond to the community's aspirations in a more efficient and better way. As I have said before, all our work is people-oriented and based on the premise of improving the well-being of citizens. Every person employed by the Government is there to serve the community - that is what we mean by public service. The quality of the Hong Kong civil service is very good, and our civil servants have been internationally recognised as among the least corrupt and the least bureaucratic. However, with continually increasing demands from the public, all Government bureaux and departments should enhance their 'serving the community' spirit and culture.

142. A key focus of civil service reforms implemented over the past two years has been to establish the principle of 'serving the community and being accountable'. Through training courses, we have enhanced civil servants' awareness of serving the community. And we have revised the disciplinary system to make the civil service at all levels more accountable to the public.

143. As the masters of our own destiny, we need to have a more acute sense of the pulse of the community in formulating our policies. We need to do our consultation work well to ensure that all public views are fully reflected. When implementing policies, we need to understand our community's inclinations and strive to gain their understanding and support.

144. Time is of the essence. In today's ever-changing world, we need to make rapid responses to issues as they arise. We also need to work efficiently without delay. Admittedly, we have not been able to put this into practice in everything we do. There are many reasons for this, including the complicated procedures involved, and the long lead time required. I spoke earlier of the need to speed up and simplify the approval procedures for public works projects. We have made some preliminary progress and I have asked the Chief Secretary for Administration and the Financial Secretary to accelerate the pace of handling community-related matters by the bureaux and departments. We aim to achieve notable changes from this improved efficiency which will benefit our citizens and enhance the business environment.