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urban context with which these officers are concerned there are no significant administra- tive areas which seem to call for anything other than the basically specialised organisations which operate already. We have learnt much about the individual districts but nothing to suggest that their differences are such as to call for significant decentralisation of authority or that there is any demand for such a change. This is not of course to say that local opinions and variations and grievances do not need to be taken into account, and it is here that the C.D.O.s can act to the advantage both of the people and of the Government; they can take up in an articulate and informed and sensible way any reasonable cause for complaint or dissatisfac- tion, whether individual or general, and generally act to promote sympathy and understand- ing in all the complex human relationships between governing and being governed. There is nothing paternalistic (or avuncular, pace the press!) about this project and I believe it may well, as time goes on, commend itself to study by other urban administrations; for whilst it may be no more than a co-incidence, we have certainly started this scheme at a tine when problems of communication and of the humanisation of bureaucratic government are thrusting themselves before the reluctant public eye in many of the world's great cities.
119.
I am wondering whether this report is not perhaps too buoyant, for this is a difficult balance sheet to cast. We have started well, in the sense that we have to some extent captured public interest and support at a time when it
/seems