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The following is issued on behalf of the Business Facilitation Advisory Committee Secretariat:
The Business Facilitation Advisory Committee held its fourth meeting today (March 6).
The committee welcomed and supported the launch of the "Be the Smart Regulator" programme by the Government to further improve the licensing processes and business environment. The committee noted that the Government was adopting a four-pronged approach to improve its licensing work, including the measurement of its performance in licensing activities and the regulatory costs on business, enhancing the licensing processes, strengthening communication between government departments and the business sector and exploring how to simplify regulations.
The current focus of the Government is to improve the processing of food-related licences (such as liquor licence and restaurant licence) of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and the club and hotel licences of the Home Affairs Department. Both departments have assigned Business Facilitation Officers to assist in improving the licensing processes, providing co-ordination for difficult applications and collecting customer feedback. Departments are now making use of an inter-departmental application tracking system, which helps them respond to the enquiries of applicants more quickly and enhances the co-ordination and communication among departments in processing food-related licences. The Administration will continue to extend these improvement measures to other departments after assessment of their effectiveness.
The Administration has set up seven Business Liaison Groups with the cinema, theme park, family amusement centre, hotel, club, and food businesses. These seven groups have held their first meetings for the business sectors and departments concerned to discuss licensing and regulatory issues. The business representatives considered that the meetings had facilitated mutual understanding with the departments. The departments concerned are taking proactive action to follow up the views of the business representatives.
The committee reviewed the work of the various business facilitation task forces. After discussing the report by the Task Force to Review the Construction Stage of the Development Process, the committee agreed that it was not appropriate to further pursue the proposal of private certification of building submissions at this stage. The Pre-construction Task Force reported to the committee that the consultancy study on the review of the processing of lease modification and land exchange applications had been completed. It was anticipated that it would help reduce the processing time of the Lands Department by some 20% after the implementation of all recommendations.
Convenor of the Food Business Task Force Mr Tommy Cheung reported to the committee that the review on liquor licensing had been completed. It was expected that the implementation of the recommendations would help shorten the processing time of new applications for liquor licence by about 40%. The trade estimated that it would result in an annual opportunity cost saving of around $200 million. At the same time, the Administration is actively taking forward the various recommendations of the review of outside seating accommodation for restaurants. It was expected that they could reduce the time for processing an outside seating application by about 30%.
The Water Supplies Department reported that the consultancy study on review of application and inspection of plumbing installations in new buildings was nearly completed. The study came up with a number of recommendations which would help halve the average elapse time for approval of plumbing installations in new buildings.
Regarding improvement of the registration of pharmaceutical products, the committee noted that the Administration had adopted a number of measures to simplify the processes as suggested by the Retail Task Force. The registration time for pharmaceutical products containing new chemical entities has been shortened by about 20%.
Papers for the committee meeting will be uploaded onto the internet (www.info.gov.hk/fso/bfac/eng) for access by the public.
Ends/Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Issued at HKT 18:09
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