A major pro-establishment union has called on the Hong Kong government to eliminate poverty by appointing a commissioner to revamp the city’s existing policies.

The Federation of Trade Unions also said that a new benchmark should be set to gauge the true number of residents in the city who were poor.

Sunday’s suggestions from union bosses came as the city’s leader defended the handful of poverty measures outlined in her policy address.

“There are not a lot of measures to alleviate poverty in the policy address as we can see, but I hope everyone can understand that if we can have a better future, we can tackle poverty at the root,” Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said at a charity event.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam defended the lack of measures aimed at tackling poverty in her policy address.

But the federation said a new commissioner for poverty, and an office which focused on anti-poverty projects, should be set up under the Chief Secretary for Administration’s Office, among other measures.

“The work conducted by the commission on poverty is not that satisfactory, they lack a determination to deliver measures to strive for the poverty alleviation goal. They simply read out their report annually,” said federation member Bill Tang Ka-piu, a former lawmaker and a member of the existing commission.

“The most important thing is to have a person who is held responsible for executing measures while he has a team to follow up [with] the low-income families one by one.”

Tang said the existing commission was not sufficient to resolve poverty, as it only kept track of the situation through an annual update of the poverty line, as well as reviewing existing and exploring new policies.

He said a new office should be set up to reach out to the poor neighbourhoods and to follow up on cases.

Tang suggested the commissioner be a politically appointed expert, a politician, or a civil servant who had the “heart” to serve and was responsible for carrying out the poverty alleviation work.

Kwun Tong and Sha Tin districts could be the pilot areas for the proposal, he added, as the two districts had the most and fastest-growing rate of poverty.

The government currently sets the poverty line at 50 per cent of the median household income by household size in 2013. The 2019 poverty line for one-person and two-person households were HK$4,500 and HK$10,000 respectively. The 2020 poverty rate is expected to be released by the end of this year.

The Federation of Trade Unions believes those whose income could not cover the basic costs of living should be considered living in poverty.

But the group suggested those whose income could not cover the basic costs of living should be considered living in poverty.

“The current poverty line may distort the size of the poor population since some [retired] households which are economically inactive are also covered,” Tang said. “Looking at the basic costs of living is more concrete, as it could also take some welfare and economic subsidies into account.”

Other proposals by the union include evaluating the minimum wage every year instead of every two years, stopping the outsourcing of public services, providing “extra-large size” public housing to intergenerational families, and narrowing the wealth gap by increasing the profit tax of more profitable businesses by one percentage point to 17.5 per cent.

But Lam said the recurrent expenditure on social welfare had substantially increased by 62 per cent since she took office in 2017, from HK$65.3 billion to HK$105.7 billion this year.

She cited examples, such as the fact that the number of low-income families covered under the working family allowance scheme had doubled over the past year.

The government also temporarily reduced the working hour requirement for applicants so more families were eligible for the allowance, even when their working hours were slashed amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In her policy address, Lam announced the merger of the two old-age allowance schemes under which about 50,000 elderly residents can get more subsidies, as the asset limit would be relaxed. The government also plans to abolish the so-called offsetting mechanism under the Mandatory Provident Fund in the next financial year.

On housing, Lam pledged to speed up public and transitional housing production. More than 50,000 families who have been waiting for public rental housing for more than three years are also subject to cash subsidies at the same time.

Sze Lai-shan, deputy director of the Society for Community Organisation, supported the federation’s proposal, but suggested the new commissioner focus on supervising different government departments to carry out “poverty impact assessments” when formulating policies, while the job of keeping in touch with poor families should be left to frontline social workers.

The government should focus on implementing measures to alleviate poverty, she said, adding “if we cannot help the families to overcome the difficulties that they are facing now, how can we talk about a better future?”