A restaurant has been barred from hiring non-local workers after it provided false information to the Labour Department in its application to bring in servers, junior cooks, and dishwashers. The programme was introduced in 2023 to alleviate the city’s manpower crunch, allowing for the hiring of non-local workers – most of them migrants from mainland China. Employers previously only needed to maintain a 2:1 ratio of full-time local to imported workers. As of May 2026, there are about 24,300 non-local workers employed in the food and beverage services sector, accounting for some 45 per cent of the 54,000 non-local workers in Hong Kong under the scheme. For example, in August of last year, a Chinese restaurant was barred from hiring non-local workers for two years after authorities found that the company fired local employees to hire non-local workers.