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place, get a part of their salary from the local Government and a part say from the central fund, but so far as their careers are concerned can be assured by the central fund here as to prospects. They would take on with us, although, as a matter of book- keeping, in order to keep the fund in reasonable proportions whenever they are loaned to a Colony, that Colony would pay such salary as they had normally got down for the appointment.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: The view was that the whole of the trained technical staff, including the most recently joined officer, should belong to that service. It would make the service a very much more important one in general with a central organisation here. If the salary in the Colony was not suffi- cient, the fund would have to make it up.
Mr. ROBERTSON: Plus a contribution towards pension? Sir DONALD CAMERON: There would be no contribution towards pension if this question is solved, as I indicated a moment ago,
Sir SAMUEL WILSON: Do you anticipate any difficulty on the part of the local Legislative Councils?
Sir DONALD CAMERON: It would not be done in an arbitrary way.
Mr. AMERY: Then there is the question of their leaving one Colony to go to another.
Sir SAMUEL WILSON: I do not know whether Sir Donald had in view the question of interchange of scientific officers, and that they should not be left long in any one Colony.
Mr. AMERY: I want to be quite clear about the proposal Do I understand it to be this? Take agriculture for instance. All recruits are recruited here by the Colonial Office into the Colonial Agricultural Service. They have before them a scale of salaries they are going to get right through, and as far as they are concerned the individual prospects they can see from the day they enter the service, and what their prospects are by way of pension. Then we farm them out to the Colonies, who par
them their rates, and in certain cases we may have to supplement those rates and make up the difference from the pool, to which all the Colonies have to contribute. the scheme?
That is
Sir DONALD CAMERON: Yes. If I may say so, I had the opportunity of having a conversation of some length with the new Director at Amani before I left, and having got the sense of opinion in Tanganyika-quite naturally Tanganyika is paying a larger sum per annum in proportion as compared with the other Colonies-I am quite willing to say to the Colonial Office that I would ask the Legislative Council to increase that sum if Amani was going to be part of an Imperial whole, and not merely parochial for one or two Colonies. I understand, from what I have seen since, that Amani is to be administered on the technical side from here.
Restriction of Imperial Service to Specialist Officers.
Mr. ORMSBY GORE: I think the first real practical problem is whether Sir Donald Cameron's proposal stands a chance of being carried for the whole agricultural service, or whether it is for the one-third of that service who are definitely specialists. In 17 principal agricultural Dependencies- I have left out all the smaller ones, and I am speaking roughly-we have now got 300 agricultural officers; 200 of those, including all the Directors of Agriculture, are administrative officers; 100 are agricultural specialists, almost exactly divided into four quarters; one quarter botanists, one quarter chemists, one quarter entomologists, and one quarter mycologists. It seems to me that the pool should be comparatively simple to work for those 100. When you come to the moving about of the ad- ministrative people you come to the large difficulties that Sir Gordon Guggisberg presses, and the necessity for administrative continuity. I throw that out for the consideration
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Sir DONALD CAMERON: I had no intention that they should be moved any more often than now on promotion. It gives you the opportunity you have not got now.
Mr. AMERY: There is one difficulty that occurs to me—1 daresay there may be a solution of it. If we guarantee our service a certain scale of pay which at present corresponds more or less to the scale of pay in the better services, and, there- fore, does not require more than a small pool to make good. what happens if a particular Colony, or a number of them, wish- ing to make money at the expense of the pool, cuts down its own scale of salaries, and therefore gets more of the balance inade up from the pool?
Sir DONALD CAMERON: We shall have to enter a caveat at the beginning.
Mr. AMERY: Of course, you would refuse to send them any good men.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: They would have to pay the difference on what they agreed if they reduced it, and not the pool.
Mr. ORMSBY GORE: And see that the scales for agricul- ture are not lower than for certain other services not in the pool-education officers or whatever the services are.
Sir EDWARD GRIGG I should think it would be more difficult to persuade the Colonies who had started on a low scale to raise it when their prospects improved.
Mr. AMERY: That is another aspect of the same argument. If your pool were fixed on some percentage of revenue, how- ever small, when their prospects improved they would be giving more to the pool.
Sir HERBERT STANLEY: Would not it be difficult in some Colonies to give a pledge or guarantee of what the Legis- lative Council might do? I am thinking specially of Ceylon.
All
Mr. ALEXANDER: It would be impossible. Also, we find that in laying down any salary scale you cannot possibly think of the agricultural service only but of all your services. these salary questions are questions of salaries of all the officers of all the different departments, and you cannot consider one without considering the other. There would otherwise be a hopeless muddle.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: We do in the medical service in East and West Africa.
Mr. ALEXANDER: You could not in Ceylon.
Mr. OLIPHANT: Could not one leave it to the option of the individual Colony whether it wishes to have an Imperial Service man or not? I cannot quite see the necessity of having a pool at all. Could not one have this on a system that you have an Imperial Service which is farmed out to the Colonies who want to take the men? Let them take men of a seniority they can afford. If they cannot afford a senior man, they can take a junior man. That applies principally to the administra-
tive branches.
Mr. ROBERTSON: Once you introduce the scheme it would be impossible to get a good man outside the scheme.
Mr. ALEXANDER: If you confined yourself to the expert research officers, I think you would be able to persuade the Legislative Council of Ceylon to vote something to get expert assistance, but you would not get them to go in for a scheme for administrative officers. For one thing, they always point out now, quite unfairly, that the administrative agricultural officer is not sufficiently in touch with the people; he does not know their language. Our efforts have been devoted mainly to tea and rubber, and so on-coconuts to some extent-but little to the needs of the agricultural population, and they would be very chary of going into a pool which would perhaps take
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