John Tsang cautious over changes to mandatory provident fund scheme

Hong Kong's mandatory provident fund scheme should not be hastily done away with, the financial secretary says, although he concedes the system has failed to give low-paid workers and the unemployed enough retirement protection.

"[An MPF overhaul] will have far-reaching implications. A decision [to change it] should not be made hastily. [Retirement protection] should not be used as a bargaining chip," John Tsang Chun-wah wrote on his official blog yesterday.

The post was seen as an implicit attack on radical pan-democrat "Long Hair" Leung Kwok-hung, who had launched a filibuster to delay the budget bill, hoping to press the government to replace the MPF system with a universal pension scheme.

Leung has vowed to do the same next year unless the government gives in to his demand.

In his blog, Tsang wrote that retirement protection was a very important topic that required consideration from various policy perspectives.

He admitted the MPF system "cannot deal with the unemployed population's retirement protection, and its protection for low-wage workers is also not enough", and agreed it was now time to review the scheme. He noted that a University of Hong Kong professor, Nelson Chow Wing-sun, was expected to submit a report to the Poverty Commission later this year.