Why MPF full portability had to wait: the 2012 LegCo logjam

The original report ran to only a few hundred characters: in early May 2012, the MPF portability bill — the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes (Amendment) Bill behind the employee choice arrangement — risked missing the legislative term, with 1 April the following year the earliest possible date to return to it. What follows is background analysis drawn from 2012 sources.

What was MPF “full portability”?

“Full portability” was the term used in 2012 for the ultimate vision of MPF reform: workers freely moving all their accrued benefits — including the employer contribution portion — to any scheme they liked. What LegCo was actually scrutinising in 2012 was “semi-portability”, the employee choice arrangement: a once-a-year transfer of only the employee portion of mandatory-contribution benefits, with the employer portion untouched. Full portability was a further goal with no legislative timetable at the time.

Why was it delayed to the following April?

The trigger was a filibuster over a different bill — the arrangement for filling Legislative Council vacancies — which drew more than a thousand so-called “frivolous” amendments and jammed the whole agenda. The House Committee decided to resume that bill on 9 May 2012, with full council meetings adjourning to make way; the MPF bill could not get a slot, leaving 1 April the next year as the earliest possible date. The LegCo Secretary General laid out the order of business: members’ questions first, then the first reading of the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill, then the thousand-plus amendments, and only then the other backlogged government and members’ bills.

What else was crowding the calendar?

Andrew Leung, chairman of the Competition Bill committee, told the House Committee the Competition Bill would go to it on 18 May, with second and third readings expected on 30 May — a measure of how packed the calendar was. The LegCo term ended on 18 July 2012, and bills were queuing for passage before the handover; for workers, the practical risk was that missing the window would sink the planned 1 November 2012 launch of the employee choice arrangement — and with it, the price war the market expected. (A companion report, ID 2983, covers the same logjam from the semi-portability angle.)