Hong Kong minister vows to give public account of Queen Mary Hospital lift saga

Hong Kong’s development minister has pledged to give a public account of whether her bureau failed to properly oversee faulty lift installations at Queen Mary Hospital’s new block, but stopped short of confirming if a new accountability system for heads of departments would be invoked to probe the saga.

Almost two weeks after Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu tasked the Development Bureau with submitting a report within a month, Secretary for Development Bernadette Linn Hon-ho said she would get to the bottom of the defective work at the hospital, where 24 of the 28 lifts in its new 34-storey clinical block were deemed unfit for use.

“Why did those issues occur with the lifts? When were those problems identified, or why have they not been identified yet? All of this will be detailed in the coming report we will submit to the chief executive, which will subsequently be disclosed to the public as well,” she told a television programme on Saturday.

But Linn stopped short of saying whether she would invoke the Heads of Departments Accountability System, unveiled in last year’s policy address, to investigate the lift incident, stressing the first phase of the follow-up investigation had already begun.