which have staff of 100 or more, and Consultative Councils have been established in 23 of these departments. At the central level, the Staff Side of the Junior and Senior Civil Service Councils will need to be served, and the Civil Service Branch will also require strengthening to enable it to participate actively in regular communication and consultation with staff. Officers selected to undertake staff relations/management work would have to be of sufficient standing, experience and seniority, and have an aptitude for personnel management. This would in turn impose on the Government the need to give priority to training in personnel management for its staff. Although it is not known at this stage exactly what additional manpower resources would be needed to implement the Commission's recommendations, it can be safely said that the requirement will be a substantial one. A degree of priority will therefore have to be given to the recruitment and training of the necessary staff in order to meet the timing proposed by the Commission.
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The second aspect relates to the setting up of the Junior Civil Service Consultative Council. As pointed out in paragraph 4.6 of the Report, there are practical problems in implementing this proposal. Firstly, the definition of "junior civil servants", which affects the membership of the Staff Side of this Council, would have to be determined. The Commission has noted that salary point might be one possible method; another method would be to determine membership by rank; yet another method would be to confine the Junior Council to Model Scale 1 staff only since their interests and conditions of service differ considerably from those of staff on the Master Pay Scale. But irrespective of the method used, difficulties will arise since the organisation of existing staff unions does not readily fit into any of these patterns. Secondly, the selection or election of members for the Staff Side would present difficulties. Steps will have to be taken to ensure that the large number of grades and departments are represented, that existing staff unions and associations are not given the wrong impression that their status would be undermined, that the size of the council would not become so big as to be unwieldy and that the interest of all junior civil servants are represented as far as possible. The Administration would therefore have to approach this problem with great care. The first step might be to establish consultative councils for junior staff in departments employing large number of such staff but in which no such councils exist. (At present, only the Royal Hong Kong Police Force and the Prisons Department have consultative Councils exclusively for junior staff). The operation of these junior departmental councils might then provide the necessary experience and foundation on which to build the new junior central council.
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One matter requiring careful examination will be the relationship between the Senior Civil Service Council and the new Junior Civil Service Consultative Council, since there will be various matters of common interest. The preliminary view is that the relationship between the two Councils is unlikely in practice to present any great difficulty provided the Administration handles matters with due sensitivity.
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