Proportion of Social Service Agencies Paying Employees According to Social Service Sector Salary Guidelines

Mr Yip Hon Weng asked the Minister for Social and Family Development in respect of the NCSS Social Service Sector Salary Guidelines (a) what is the percentage of social service agencies currently paying their employees in accordance with these recommendations; and (b) what specific measures are being taken to support the other agencies which have not met the salary guidelines to close the wage gap.

Mr Speaker, currently, about 80% of employees in social service agencies (SSAs) are paid according to the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) Sector Skills and Salary Guidelines, which I will call "salary guidelines" from now on.

Over the years, the Ministry for Social and Family Development (MSF) has reviewed and raised the salary guidelines so that wages in the social service sector remain competitive against comparable roles in competing markets. Correspondingly, MSF adjusts programme funding to enable funded SSAs to pay employees according to the latest guidelines. SSAs should also review and adjust their operational budgets, so they can sustainably meet operational needs. Our data suggests that SSAs have generally been keeping pace with these updates to the salary guidelines.

Over the past three years, MSF and NCSS have worked with SSAs to progressively improve adherence to the salary guidelines. Beyond current efforts, such as supporting SSAs in enhancing their human resource (HR) practices, we engage SSA leaders on their organisations' salary adherence and benchmark them to their peers. In the next few years, we will further step up measures to increase adherence.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister for his response. I have two supplementary questions. Has MSF studied the relationship between wage non-compliance and staff turnover, vacancy rates or case load pressures? Because these issues as a whole, may cause workforce instability, which may in turn pose a risk to service delivery to beneficiaries.

And secondly, how is MSF ensuring that smaller community-based SSAs are not disproportionately affected, given that they may have a weaker fundraising capability compared to the larger agencies?

We thank the Member for the supplementary questions. We have not done any correlation or impact study on wage adherence with turnover. But certainly, case load has a strong impact on possible turnover; and it is something that we always are mindful of, and we make sure that the case load and the funding and the number of social workers that each programme needs would be commensurate.

Of course, we will listen to the ground when there are specific areas which need more resources or more intents by nature of the locality. We will then support, perhaps even a bespoke way.

For smaller communities, certainly, they have overheads, like every other SSAs, but they may have a smaller programme funding possibility. And therefore we are engaging them regularly to make sure that they are keeping up and also can tap on a number of resources that are available to upgrade, improve HR practices, for example, and even tap on expertise, which may be available for free from corporates who provide them as part of their pro bono services, or part of their corporate social responsibility services.