(FP: 1/10)
CONFIDENTIAL
Commonwealth Office
SW.1
25 April, 1968.
99%,
Governors' Emoluments
I have long since told you on the telephone how very grateful we were for your most helpful letter (2-FD 488/1043/01B) of 27 February. This has enabled us to turn our minds to all the outstanding problems affecting the numerically diminished race of Governors; and I think that the problems fall into the following three categories.
Effects of devaluation
20
In the second sub-paragraph of paragraph 2 (i) of your letter of 27 February you said "We still prefer to retain the traditional principle that territories are primarily responsible for their Governor's salary etc." The territories express these salaries etc. in their estimates in local currency. The Governors were, of course, notified of them in sterling in their Letters of Appointment. So long as the original parity between sterling and the currency of the various territories remained as it was, there was no problem. But five Governors were affected by devaluation, namely the Bahamas, Fiji, Hong Kong, Swaziland and the Western Pacific. The position was doubly complicated in the case of the Governor of Fiji because his Letter of Appointment expressed his emoluments in terms of both sterling and Fijian pounds at the pre-devaluation rate of exchange and it has manifestly now become a nonsense. I think that the simplest way of dealing with this problem is to amend the sums in all the five Letters of Appointment concerned to conform with the sums in local currency which appear in the estimates of the territories in question; and I should be grateful for your confirmation that this is in order.
Pensions
3. The maximum pension for any Governor is limited by Section 3 of the Governors' Pensions Act 1957, Sub-section (1) of which has been amended, under the provisions of Sub-section (3), by Statutory Instrument No. 1217 of 1964. The provisions of these two, read together, are that a Governor's maximum pension shall be two-thirds of the yearly amount of the highest salary he has ever received or £5,100, whichever is the less. We have now reached in respect of Hong Kong the anomalous position in which the Colonial Secretary could, if he reached his maximum entitlement, retire on a pension of £5,800 per annum, which is no
S. H. Wright, Esq.,
Treasury.
/less
CONFIDENT IAL
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