Why reforms alone won’t prevent a repeat of Tai Po fire

In the end, it was Winnie Ho Wing-yin, housing secretary at the time of the Wang Fuk Court fire in Tai Po, who took the rap. Her resignation came after weeks of talk within political circles suggesting that bureau chiefs would not have to bear responsibility for the tragedy that killed 168 people and displaced 1,984 families.

These suggestions were met with shock. Some spoke out against such talk, including Andrew Fung Wai-kwong, former information coordinator for the Chief Executive’s Office, and retired administrative officer Mike Rowse. Both reminded the public that Hong Kong has a ministerial system, and that political responsibility is very much part of the package.

The political accountability system created by the late Tung Chee-hwa demands that political appointees step down for failures on their watch, even if they were not personally responsible. Yet, for weeks, political accountability was hardly mentioned even though it was clear the report on the fire would implicate the Housing Bureau’s Independent Checking Unit, the Development Bureau’s Buildings Department, the Security Bureau’s Fire Services Department and the Labour and Welfare Bureau’s Labour Department.

At the press conference on the findings of the investigation report, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu was grilled on whether the other ministers would similarly take responsibility. He said he himself had reflected on his own actions, and that he and the rest of the team would stay on to execute the reforms needed to make sure such a tragedy would not happen again.

Lee said his ministers were accountable to him, and called Ho’s resignation his “personal political decision” after a comprehensive evaluation of various considerations.

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Hong Kong government apologises for deadly Wang Fuk Court fire, housing secretary Winnie Ho resigns

As his political appointees, they are of course accountable to him. But political accountability should not be Lee’s “personal political decision”. At the end of the day, the public has to be satisfied that enough of a political price has been paid for the government departments’ buck-passing that contributed to the tragedy.

The resignation of one minister and the government’s apology – which came almost a year after the disaster – may not be enough. An unfavourable public reaction, particularly reactions of the survivors, would call into question Lee’s political judgment.

The independent committee tasked with investigating the fire found that “no government department took effective ownership of various fire safety issues, and complaints about fire hazards fell into a vacuum”, making it clear that the lapses cut across different departments.

The report called out the lack of coordination between the Buildings Department and the Independent Checking Unit – the two agencies “primarily responsible” for supervising the renovation of Wang Fuk Court – that resulted in a failure of their “supervisory duties in ensuring the safety of such works”. The failings were “systemic and multi-layered”, the report said; in summary, “a combination of the following deficiencies: lack of a sense of crisis, regulatory lapses, systemic blind spots, and enforcement failures”.

Had those departments done their part to plug the regulatory loopholes, paid sufficient attention to residents’ complaints and addressed the clear and obvious risks, there would have been “a real possibility that the misconduct of the private-sector parties and the fire hazards in Wang Fuk Court could have been rectified before the fire”.

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The report noted that the Independent Checking Unit was established as part of the reform measures the government undertook in 2000, following a series of piling scandals that rocked the city in the late 1990s. For the agency to now become a culprit in the Tai Po disaster is unfathomable. It was set up to exercise oversight and monitoring. Now it is to be shut down for the dereliction of its duties.

Lee must understand that it is not enough to introduce reforms. The government rolled out reforms in the past that were meant to address loopholes and bad practices in the construction sector that had gone on for decades. Yet lax attitudes by those responsible for oversight and enforcement in a reformed system led to this tragedy.

So while reforms are necessary, it’s equally important to ensure that any new systems are effective. Getting to the bottom of why reforms failed, before we introduce more of them, needs to be the focus.

In addition to the reforms and amendments to legislation, a team under the Public Service Commission will assess the culpability of dozens of officers and civil servants. It has three months to look into how exactly that culture of buck-passing came to be. We should expect more heads to roll, because not only did the system fail but the people manning the system failed spectacularly, too.