Waive extra stamp duty on home purchases and give HK$50,000 to adults who freeze eggs or sperm, government adviser says
- Executive Council head Regina Ip suggests cutting in half the 30 per cent stamp duty on home purchases that non-locals must pay
- She also recommends paying parents HK$20,000 for each child they have as a way to combat population decline
Hong Kong should consider waiving extra stamp duty on home purchases by mainland Chinese arrivals and other newcomers who have lived in the city for at least three years, while offering cash incentives and subsidies to encourage couples to have babies, a top government adviser has suggested.
Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, convenor of the Executive Council, a key decision-making body, on Thursday recommended the government offer a HK$20,000 (US$2,500) “baby bonus” to parents and a HK$50,000 subsidy to Hongkongers to freeze their eggs and sperm as such services were expensive.
“Many women and men who have a high income and are well-educated get married later in life. To give them a choice on the best timing to give birth to children, the government should encourage them to ultilise these technology to store their sperm and eggs,” she said, speaking on behalf of her New People’s Party.
The incentives would help ensure the city remained just as attractive a place to work and raise a family as Britain, Canada and Singapore, while reversing a brain drain and drop in the birth rate, she argued.
Ip put forward her party’s suggestions after meeting city leader John Lee Ka-chiu earlier in the day to discuss proposals for his first policy address scheduled for next month. Lee has said that attracting talent would be one of the top priorities of his administration.
Hong Kong has lost tens of thousands of residents in recent years after a number of countries offered them bespoke pathways to citizenship following Beijing’s imposition of the national security law in 2020. Some 113,200 residents left the city between mid-2021 and mid-2022, official data showed. The number of births in Hong Kong also hit a record low last year, falling below 40,000 for the first time in more than five decades.
To encourage immigration, Ip suggested reducing the 30 per cent stamp duty on home purchases levied on non-locals, double what residents who are not first-time buyers pay. That rate was too high and discouraged immigrants from settling down, she maintained, suggesting arrivals who had lived in the city for at least three years pay the same 15 per cent as locals.
