*
3
wwritten
2
RECEIVED IN
REGISTRY No. 74 CONFIDENTIAL
Dim
Joels
-4 MAY 1977
-584
See also (3).
p.a.my
dia.
du. Farper.
Mr Cortazzi
HKG 025/1
MANAGING THE DEPENDENT TERRITORIES
Our present arrangements cater for a good many of the points in Mr Posnett's minute of 6 April (attached) and for precisely the reason that is the main thrust of his argument, viz. the administration of the Dependent Territories has specialist characteristics which are
With a few outside the FCO and Diplomatic Service mainstream. exceptions for special reasons, the Dependent Territories work has been gathered into the Joint FCO/ODM Dependent Territories Division. As the joint system causes some difficulties in London it is very welcome to read Mr Posnett's endorsement of it from the consumer's viewpoint. A measure of "Colonial experience" has been secured by the appointment of officers with an HMOCS or Colonial Office background to certain key positions, eg the Heads of HK&GD and WIAD and one. Assistant in PDTD, and by the retention part-time (3 days a week) of' Mr C J Hall as adviser to HK&GD's Administrative Legal and Judicial ·
This Unit, which deals also with the Dependencies · Arhaul Staffing Unit. Arfistant-
cared for outside the DT Division, acts as a sort of Personnel Depart- Mr Hall HKAD
ment for the still quite numerous remaining Colonial Service: 128. has recently produced the following count (Hong Kong in brackets):·
We take . Administrative 215 (122); Legal and Judicial 245 (184). care to select Governors with appropriate personal and professional · qualities, through a special Board, in which the Chief Clerk has recognised that DS career structure questions must be subordinated to the requirements of the job. I, and Sir N Larmour before me, have travelled widely in the Dependencies and I have been able to increase the frequency of touring by Heads of Departments and desk officers. This greatly helps to secure mutual understanding between London and
Governors and senior officers abroad, thereby mitigating their sense of loss from the demise of the Colonial Office, their own Whitehall Department which nevertheless they used to criticise just as much as
Outside the they now do the FCO, and for very much the same reasons. the Division, there is still much Colonial expertise elsewhere in the ODM and in the Caribbean Development Division where the present Head, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, can to a large extent fill the avuncular role of the larger Governors or High Commissioners of days gone by.
2.
I think it welcome, and timely, to have this general endorsement of our arrangements from someone of Mr Posnett's experience, on the eve of the presentation of the CPRS Report. I foresee that we shall need to retain the main elements of this organisation into the 1980s, though it should be possible to compress it as the Pacific Dependencies go independent (and we can now hope to complete this, including the New Hebrides but excepting Pitcairn, by 1980). natural that, as Mr Posnett has indicated in moderate terms, our In particular, the present arrangements do not work perfectly. Pacific (not Hong Kong) is less well served than the Caribbean mainly, but not entirely, because there is nothing like the Caribbean DevDiv
It is
/there.
CONFIDENTIAL