The Chief Executive, Mrs Carrie Lam, today (July 4) led the Non-official Members of the Executive Council (ExCo) to meet the media after chairing the first ExCo meeting. Following is the transcript of remarks of the media session:

Reporter: Mrs Lam, seven out of 16 of the new ExCo team are lawmakers. Some people have criticised, saying that this might actually harm LegCo function in balancing out the administration work. How would you respond to them? Also, in the past critics have also said that, well, decision made by the Executive Council is not based on a basket of considerations, rather by one man. Would that happen again, and how would you prevent that from happening?

Chief Executive: Well, I don't want to comment on how policies were being formulated in the past, but of course I was a member of the previous cabinets in deciding or making policies for Hong Kong. I just want to stress that I take it very seriously that I need to interact, and when I said "I", actually it covers also my Principal Officials, that we all need to interact more closely with Non-official Members of the Executive Council so that they can fully discharge their role to be our advisers in formulating these policies with a view to ensuring greater society acceptance of these government policy decisions.

     As far as the overlap in the membership of the Legislative Council and the Executive Council, this is actually nothing new. There has always been this sort of dual membership of some of the members in order to maintain a link between the Executive Council and the Legislative Council, and I've just said in my introductory remarks that the seven current Legislative Council members who have agreed to serve on the Executive Council are not there to just rubber stamp the government policies or to help us to lobby for Legislative Council members' support. They are there to convey to us the views and sentiments of the Legislative Council members, so that these views and opinions could also be taken on board at an early stage.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

Ends/Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Issued at HKT 15:27

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