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Governor: It's an important question. I would just say before coming to the main points that the Honourable Member makes, that I can think of a recent example of somebody coming in from outside to head a largely professional part of Government who has done an outstanding job. And I think the Honourable Member and I both share the same regard for the Secretary in question. And under his leadership we've actually seen very good professionals brought on to take over from him in due course.
The Secretary for the Civil Service was giving evidence this morning to the relevant LegCo panel and I'm sure answered this question more eloquently and knowledgeably than I will do, but there are two points that I want to focus on.
First of all, yes, there may be civil servants leaving the Administration over the next couple of years. In two years' time there'll be a Governor leaving the Administration too. But so far, I think it's fair to say that while we understand the possible dangers, some of the language which has been used about departures has been extremely extravagant, when you actually look at what's been happening in individual departments and across the civil service as a whole. Wastage from the civil service over the last 12 month period was running at just over 5 per cent, though admittedly in directorate posts the wastage was about 11 per cent. Also true to note that a large number of those in the directorate are in what I think is called the "retirement zone" and could find themselves in a year or two's time facing difficult personal choices about what was most in their financial interest. So, we're not unaware of the problems that we could face and other organisations face, particularly the professional staff.
We have been trying, the second point I wanted to make, we have been trying to address this particular issue with our training programmes and the Honourable Gentleman, the Secretary for the Civil Service was addressing that particular issue this morning, training right across the board. We've reviewed our overall training policy and we've also put a lot more resources, not least in terms of personal interest, into training to try to ensure that our professionals are in the position which the Honourable gentleman quite properly said they should be in, in which they can take charge of departments and show general management skills. For that purpose a number of them have had the advantage of management courses abroad as well as management courses in Hong Kong. So we'll continue to put emphasis on training and hope that we can avoid the problem which the Honourable gentleman mentioned.
Of course, the most important thing for us to do of all is to ensure that the morale of the civil service remains as high as possible before and after 1997, so that as many of our excellent civil servants as possible remain in the public service doing as good a job in the future as they do today.