Hong Kong’s welfare chief has defended the government’s decision to abolish an income-based poverty line , as lawmakers question how the authorities will gauge the city’s poverty levels going forward.
A woman pushes a trolley full of cardboard boxes in Hong Kong. File: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Addressing the Legislative Council’s Panel on Welfare Services on Monday, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun said that the old poverty benchmark failed to objectively reflect the situation in Hong Kong and could not accurately address the difficulties faced by vulnerable groups.
Prior to the change, households that made under 50 per cent of the median monthly household income before tax and welfare were considered to be living in poverty.
“We cannot just look at economic factors and rely on handouts from public funds. We need a more comprehensive support system and a tighter welfare network,” he said.
The government needs to provide welfare, healthcare, education, and public housing, while providing targeted assistance measures such as community living rooms, after-school care services, and the Strive and Rise programme, he added.
The labour minister’s comments came after the government moved to abolish an income-based poverty line in favour of a new “targeted” poverty alleviation approach.
The government published a report last month outlining a framework of 21 indicators to identify three main vulnerable groups, including elderly households, single-parent families, and subdivided flat tenants.
It does not set out a new official definition for poverty.
A study presented at the University of Hong Kong last month revealed that Hong Kong is among the most unequal societies in terms of wealth distribution. Yang Li, an advanced researcher at the Germany-based ZEW-Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, examined data from 1981 and 2021. He found that, by 2018, at least 10.3 per cent of Hong Kong’s total private wealth was controlled by the richest 0.001 per cent of the population, according to the SCMP.
Lawmaker concerns
At the legislature, lawmakers Cheung Pui-kong and Chan Pui-leung asked how the government would monitor the poverty rate on a macroeconomic scale after the poverty line was abolished.
Sun said: “Let’s say you calculated a poverty line based on income. If you want to know where those people living in poverty are, this line can’t tell you that,” adding that many other governments do not use an income-based poverty line.
Hong Kong Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun attends the first meeting of the eighth Legislative Council (LegCo) on January 14, 2026. File Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Lawmaker Chau Siu-chung asked whether the government would address issues beyond the three target demographics, including youth poverty. He cited a 2020 report which stated that a third of those living in poverty were aged 25 to 29, including half that were educated at post-secondary level.
Sun said that a lack of opportunities for youth was not an issue of poverty. “This has to do with how the society as a whole can create more opportunities for young people for upward mobility,” he said in Chinese.
The authorities stopped publishing annual poverty figures in 2022 after the current administration took office, years before the new report was published.
The government said in a legislative document that defining poverty as a percentage of the median household income “could neither fully [nor] accurately reflect the true picture of poverty nor properly assess the overall effectiveness of relevant policies.”
“In light of the limitations of the ‘poverty line,’ the current-term Government has developed a multidimensional analytical framework based on the ‘people-oriented’ principle to examine the characteristics, needs and difficulties of target groups from multiple perspectives,” the Labour and Welfare Bureau said in a related document.
Income indicators
Commenting on the change after the report was published, Sun said that the income-based poverty line could not accurately identify those in need, pointing to elderly residents who had no income but owned property and assets of their own.
A man sits on the street in Hong Kong, File photo: Lea Mok/HKFP.
Using an income-based benchmark could see the number of those in need overestimated, he said.
Addressing Sun’s claim about income-based metrics, Oxfam Hong Kong said that the value of assets could be converted into an estimate of monthly disposable income.
The charity also said that the new framework could make better use of income indicators to identify high-risk individuals and inform poverty prevention policies.