Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London S.W.1
Staff Relations in the Hong Kong Civil Service
The Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Lord Shepherd, has directed me to reply to your
letter to him dated 7 June concerning staff relations in
Hong Kong, to which was annexed the note of the meeting
you held with Mr. Daniel Jones, M.P. in April.
Lord Shepherd sees no reason why after only one year's experiment the Senior Civil Service Council should be regarded as failing to provide an effective consultative body. Indeed he is pleased to note that on 16 June the staff
side agreed to the continuation of the Council for a further
period of at least one year, with only one minor amendment to
its constitution.
The Council appears to provide adequate machinery for
full and frank discussion of service-wide matters. At the
same time individual Associations remain free as before to
represent sectional matters outside the Council and individual
officers continue to enjoy the right to proceed by way of
petition. It is sometimes inevitable that Staff Associations
which participate in joint consultative machinery of this kind
have to sacrifice a viewpoint, even a sectional interest, for
the general good and to avoid clashes of opinion which might
otherwise result in a collapse of the machinery. Lord Shepherd feels that, after only one year's experience in Hong Kong, it
is only to be expected that the Association and the official
side taking part in the Senior Civil Service Council should
still be feeling their way with this new machinery and gaining
experience in the give and take of consultative process. He
points out that in this country it has taken many years of
effort, patience and striving for mutual understanding to
achieve a high standard of staff relations. He is sure that
as far as your Association is concerned and so long as the
right spirit of goodwill prevails, the present machinery, whose extension in time has now been agreed, will provide the best
basis for the achievement of the Council's objectives. In the circumstances Lord Shepherd feels that there in not a need to
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