(A) Staff Development

It is the development policy of the Land Registry to provide opportunities and encouragement for staff at all stages of their career to realize their potential by obtaining knowledge, skills and experience. This is to help them to master changes in work, prepare for new challenges and responsibilities and sustain improvements in the Land Registry as a public service provider and as a workplace of the highest quality.

To develop our staff to reach their full potential, the Land Registry has formulated plans for the coming year to send officers to attend overseas training at leading institutions for public service and business development, training attachment to overseas land registries, and centrally organized training programme of the Civil Service Bureau. Through the development programme, officers are empowered with competencies and enhanced personal effectiveness to make full and effective contribution to the development of the department as a whole.


(B) Legal Training

To strengthen the core grade – the Land Registration Officer grade of the department – for higher competencies at work, a custom-built legal training programme will be developed with local academic institutions and be kicked off in 2008/09. The programme aims to enhance the officers’ general as well as work related legal knowledge in performing under the LRO so that they become more effective in dealing with the complex registration work now and be well prepared for the new challenges ahead with the launch of the title registration system.


(C) Stress Management

To promote good health and as a caring employer, the Land Registry has regularly organized seminars on mental health, preventive measures on mood disorder and work life balance for staff. In the coming year, we will continue to organize a series of stress management programmes to strengthen staff’s ability to cope with stress and to promote balanced work-life. In order to foster a caring and safety culture and to ensure that work stress is properly controlled, the Land Registry will also review the existing centrally provided counselling service to ensure that professional advice on stress management are easily accessible by the staff.


(D) Green Management

The major impact of the Land Registry’s business operation on the environment is the consumption of paper and energy. We instituted a number of paper saving measures in 2007. They include the conversion of various operational reports from hard to soft copies, switching of the Staff Magazine from printed to electronic version and the adoption of our reports-on-title in soft copy by government department users. We will continue efforts in this aspect to promote the reduction of paper consumption. Separately, the department is in discussion with the Hong Kong Association of Banks and Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation arrangements to allow for filing of Standard Terms Documents. If this is implemented, we will be able to reduce substantially the bulk of mortgage documents required for registration and the associated paper consumption for processing.

The closing down of search offices in the Sai Kung and North districts in April 2007 has enabled us to eliminate the need to conduct daily transportation trips between these places and the Land Registry offices in QGO, thus contributing to less fuel consumption and carbon emission. If our plan to relocate Central Imaging Centre to QGO is materialized in future, more transportation trips can be saved.