Hong Kong civil service vacancy rates suggest our happiness may have been exaggerated

The finer points of civil servant staffing are not usually a hot news topic. But the latest grim update from the Civil Service Bureau was eagerly covered by Hong Kong’s English-language newspapers.

It was not surprising that different reporters made different choices. The “source” was the Civil Service Bureau’s written replies to questions from legislators in response to the budget speech. These were all published on the same day, involved a great deal of repetition, and ran to well over 300 pages.

Having browsed in this heap of information, I think I would have gone for staff dismissals as the most interesting topic. The leading reasons for dismissal from the civil service in the last five years were: failure to get a COVID vaccination, 21 cases; absence or lateness, 20 cases; shoplifting or theft, 18 cases; and “sex-related offences,” 14 cases.

Offences against public order and other protest-related peccadilloes only amounted to six. My personal favourite category was “Others (e.g. illegal gambling, perverting the course of justice, computer-related offences, murder etc).” It is nice to know that murder is grounds for dismissal, though other punishments are probably more salient to the criminal concerned.

However, on to the grim news. This was that, as The Standard put it: “The bureau said on Friday that the number of departures in the civil service increased from over 8,500 people in the year 2018-2019 to over 10,100 people in the year 2022-2023. Among them, nearly 1,000 people were under 30, and almost 3,000 had less than ten years of service.”

This might lead the careless reader to think that civil servants were heading for the nearest exit in droves. Hong Kong has about 160,000 civil servants and the normal length of service for a graduate entrant would be something over 30 years. So you would, in normal circumstances, expect about 5,000 people a year to leave simply because they have reached retirement age.

And unless I have completely misunderstood the Civil Service bureau’s tables, that is roughly what happens. More than half of the 10,000 “departures” were because of “retirement.” In 2022-23, 5,918 out of 10,126. The category we should be worrying about is “resignation,” which is much lower but rising: 1,863 in 2020-21, 3,863 in 2022-23.

And the worrying thing about this is that if you look at the departures broken down by age groups, the figures for 20 to 50 total 3,479, nearly half of whom are in the 30 to 40 bracket. There must be at least a suspicion that many of these comparatively young professionals are not just leaving the civil service, but Hong Kong as well.

This in turn suggests that official estimates of the level of happiness produced by recent changes have been somewhat exaggerated.

This is rather born out by the figures for individual departments. The two which are particularly beset by a large number of unfilled vacancies are RTHK and the Police Force.

RTHK had the highest vacancy rate of any government department, at 24 per cent. No wonder they have robots reading the weather bulletin. Indeed, looking at their news output there is clearly a wider role for Artificial Intelligence. Even a dumb computer can rewrite government press releases, which seem to be the favoured news source these days.

The highest absolute number of vacancies is in the police force. The force had 1,180 resignations last year which, looking on the bright side, was lower than the record high of 1,802 recorded in 2019-20.

It appears, unsurprisingly, that life in the force since 2019 has changed, and the arrival of national security and peaceful streets has produced further different changes, leaving quite a lot of police folk feeling that the new lifestyle is not what they signed up for.

In particular the force is, alas, no longer held in the high levels of public esteem to which it believed itself to be accustomed and entitled. It has a large and efficient public relations organisation. But expecting adroit reputation management to obliterate painful real-world memories involving tear gas and pepper spray is to ask more than public relations can deliver.

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