administration in Hong Kong. In this we are primarily concerned with the police, Administrative service and the
Judiciary and have taken these measures to encourage continuity.
- (Not for public consumption) If we were now to have to tell
the Treasury that there were a further potential 300 odd officers who could have a claim for a sterling safeguard, we
would be likely to lose everything for HMOCS.
Our Legal Consultant's advice is that, on Judicial review grounds we are fairly safe. We have made provision in the JD for the payment of
pensions. No officers in HK have a contractual right to have their
pension paid outside HK- there is no need: there are no exchange
controls in HK. And all the correspondence that we are aware of has
been in respect of HMOCS officers, not others.
We can expect this group of non-HMOCS pensionable officers to seek clarification of our policy when we announce any safeguard
arrangements for HMOCS members. We thus need to consider what line we will take. Our first line should be as above- adequate arrangements are already in place in the JD. If that failed to hold, the second line would be to say that it would be for the government of the day to decide what to do in any given set of circumstances. This line was
deployed in a number of replies to MPs in 1985 when enquiries were
made as to what we would do if the relevant provisions in the JD were
somehow not met. As a last resort we could consider introducing a
policy which took some account of the connection of the individuals to
the UK. There seems to be little logic in someone who has retired to
India and may never have even visited the UK to be able to have his
pension safeguarded in sterling terms. If something has to be
done it might be appropriate to look at maintaining the value of the
pension in terms of the currency of the country in which the officer
has retired.