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Secondly, because all adjustments to pay scales since 1971 have been within the existing framework of the 48-point Master Pay Scale, improvements to grade pay scales have generally been confined to the lower ranks, thus resulting in the compression of grade pay minima and maxima. That is to say, differentials have been further reduced by the raising of lower rank pay scales while higher rank pay scales have remained unchanged. In our First Report on Civil Service Pay, we ourselves made a significant number of upward adjustments to the pay scales of lower and middle ranks in the civil service, but were constrained from making any such adjustments to the pay scales of the more senior ranks because this would have involved our encroaching upon the pay of the Directorate. On the strength of the information we have now received, we consider it appropriate to review the pay structure of these higher ranks.
We accept that there may be good reasons for
tapering service-wide pay increases and in raising lower rank pay scales, when justified, without necessarily improving the pay scales of higher ranks. Nevertheless where these practices are pursued, the time comes when, if the management structure is not to be seriously weakened, and levels of responsibility are to be adequately reflected in pay, action is necessary to go some way to restore a reasonable differential between the pay of more senior officers and that of the staff they supervise. We have received sufficient evidence of the failure to retain experienced civil servants, and the strain placed on management as a result, for us to conclude that this time has now come for the Hong Kong civil service.
Having reached the conclusion that an adjustment to the upper end of the Master Pay Scale and the Disciplined Services Pay Scale is warranted, we had next to determine how such an adjustment should be made. We first examined the possibility of a straightforward increase in the dollar value of the points at the upper end of the scales, but rejected this approach since it would have produced distortion in the pattern of the scales, would do nothing to resolve the problem of compression within grade pay structures and would have involved tapering in reverse. After careful consideration, we therefore decided that the problem of differentials could best be resolved by extending the Master Pay Scale and Disciplined Services Pay Scale by three points, and by making a minor adjustment to the scale increments above Master Pay Scale Point 45 and Disciplined Services Pay Scale Point 31 to arrive at the maximum which we considered appropriate, having regard to the likely minimum pay for the Directorate. Our recommended revised scales are at Annex A to this letter.
If our proposals for the revision of the upper end of the Master Pay Scale and the Disciplined Services Pay Scale are accepted, there remains the question of how it should be applied to existing grade structures. In this connection, we recommend that civil service posts at present attracting MPS Point 46 48 or the DPS equivalents should in future be paid
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