The Government will enhance the Low-income Working Family Allowance to benefit more households by extending it to cover singletons and increasing allowance rates.
The scheme will be renamed the Working Family Allowance.
Delivering her 2017 Policy Address today, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said under the plan, a four-person household with two eligible children will see a 23% rise in their monthly allowance to $3,200 if the monthly household income is $19,000 or below and the total monthly working hours of all household members are no less than 192.
The allowance initiatives are scheduled to be implemented in April.
Mrs Lam also pledged to reduce the waiting time to zero for two kinds of services: pre-school rehabilitation services for children with special needs, such as those suffering from autism, hyperactivity disorder, language disorder or dyslexia; and home and community care services for the elderly, including those discharged from hospital.
In the year ahead, the Government will boost places for pre-school rehabilitation services from 3,000 to 7,000 and the number of community care service vouchers will increase to 6,000 in 2018-19.
The Government will earmark $1 billion to set up a fund to promote gerontechnology and subsidise elderly service units to produce technology products.
It will inject $300 million into the Child Development Fund in 2018-19 to launch more projects to benefit children from low-income families.
It will also allocate an extra $447 million to extend the Short-term Food Assistance Service for three years.
