Hong Kong minister pledges public account on faulty lifts at Queen Mary Hospital

Hong Kong's Development Minister Bernadette Linn Hon-ho has promised to disclose a public account of the faulty lift installations at Queen Mary Hospital's new block, though she did not explicitly confirm the use of a new accountability system for department heads to probe the issue. Almost two weeks after Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu instructed the Development Bureau to submit a report within a month, Linn assured that the root cause of the defective work would be investigated and reported to the chief executive, which would then be made public.

However, she clarified that she had not decided whether to invoke the Heads of Departments Accountability System, introduced in last year's policy address, to investigate the lift incident, emphasizing that the initial phase of the follow-up investigation had already commenced. Linn stated that the Development Bureau, which was not originally involved in the Queen Mary Hospital project, had launched a review and investigation to assess whether the department directly under their oversight fulfilled their responsibilities throughout various stages of the project.

Sources have reported that Chief Project Manager Li Pak-yee of the Architectural Services Department, who managed the project at the new block at Hong Kong Island's largest hospital, was asked to resign and left her position over the scandal. The department denied it was a "forced resignation," claiming she had left for "personal reasons" after giving three months' notice.

The installation defects, revealed last month, have delayed the full commissioning of the hospital's new HK$13.5 billion block by up to a year, prompting serious concerns over project oversight and civil service accountability. Linn also mentioned that the government needed to evaluate the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures of a housing project on the Fanling Golf Course following a court ruling that overturned the EIA approval.

She expressed the government's intention to carefully re-examine the necessary assessments, timeline adjustments, and overall impact of the project's scale, as they currently lack the EIA report to support their decision.