CO885-11 — Page 496

47

492

(2) Revision of Salaries, Passage Allowances, etc.

C. 73230/9/30 [No. 1].

(No. 292.)

MY LORD,

No. 13.

THE GOVERNOR to THE SECRETARY OF STATE.

(Received 22nd April, 1930.)

[Answered by Nos. 15 and 17.]

Queen's House, Colombo, 7th April, 1930.

I have the honour to invite Your Lordship's attention to the 58th paragraph of my despatch of the 2nd June, 1929,* in which I dealt with the recommendation of the Special Commission on the Constitution that a Salaries Commission should be sent out from Great Britain, and indicated that I felt some doubt in regard to that recommendation. I would refer especially to the following passage in that paragraph

C

A general revision of salaries is now under reference to a Select Committee of the Legislative Council which was appointed some time ago in compliance with a promise made by the Government when the last Salaries Scheme was adopted. The Committee has presented a Report dealing exhaustively and on the whole, I should say, generously with the emoluments of the lower grades of the Service. That Report has been submitteri to you, and the Legislative Council will shortly be asked to approve of the financial provision necessary for its adoption. I gather that the Committee's Report in regard to the higher branches of the Service (including the Civil Service) is not unlikely to become available in the fairly near future. If its recommendations are satisfactory to the Government and to you, and if the Legislative Council is prepared to sanction the necessary financial provision for the adoption of these recommendations as well as those of the Report dealing with the lower grades, there would be no occasion at present to invoke the advice of a Commission from Great Britain in respect of any such general revision of salaries. If, however, a satisfactory revision of salaries and a satisfactory settlement of the question of the passage allowance should not be effected locally at a reasonably early date, I should feel constrained to ask you to take the appointment of a Salaries Commission from Great Britain, as a condition of the grant of the new Constitution, into further consideration." Your Lordship, in paragraph 21 of your despatch of 10th October,† accepted my views with regard to the appointment of a Salaries Commission, and stated that you saw no reason for sending such a Commission to Ceylon at this stage, and did not propose to make any provision to this effect in the Order in Council. I read this latter statement as qualified by Your Lordship's general acceptance of my views, and do not understand it as precluding me from the further review of the situation which indicated would be necessary if a satisfactory revision of salaries and a satisfactory settlement of the question of the passage allowance should not be effected locally at a reasonably early date."

C

2. The report of the Salaries Committee on the higher branches of the Service has been presented, and has been published in Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1930, copies of which have been sent to Your Lordship in the ordinary course. I enclose herewith three further copiest for facility of reference. Your Lordship will remember that the Special Commissioners were not optimistic as to the results of the labours of the Committee. They described it as unwieldy and ill-equipped for a task of such magnitude and complexity," and stated that its appointment has been sufficient to arouse serious anxiety throughout the Ceylon Services." Their apprehension has, in part, proved to be unfounded. The Committee's report on the clerical service was on the whole satisfactory and the adoption of its recommendations has been sanctioned by the Legislative Council, with effect from the 1st October, 1930. But I regret to have to say that the report on the services graded in the Civil List has not fulfilled, my hope that its recommendations generally would be satisfactory to the Government and likely to prove satisfactory to Your Lordship.

* Cmd. 3419.

+ C. 63230/7/29 [No. 11]: not printed.

Not reprinted.

3.

Your Lordship will recollect that on the 1st October, 1929 (nine days before the date of your above-mentioned despatch of the 10th October), I addressed the above telegram to you :--

My despatch of 2nd June, Constitution. With special reference to para- graph 58 present position is that action on Report of Salaries Committee on lower grades of Public Service is still in abeyance. Budget Committee declined to make provision in Estimates for Rs. 3,000,000/- required to give effect to recom- mendations as from 1st October, 1928, to 30th September, 1930, although Unofficial Members last year had extracted from Government pledge to propose such retrospective effect if recommendations, which then were not yet available, were accepted by Government and by you. On 5th September, Government moved Resolution to that end in open Council. On 6th September, Council by 25 votes to 19 (twelve of latter being official) adopted amendment that the Resolution be deferred till the Report was considered in all its bearings by the Council after the third Reading of the Supply Bill. Impossible to foresee at present what action Council will take when matter is brought up again. Report of Salaries Committee on higher grades, including Civil Service, not yet signed, but I gather from Colonial Treasurer who is Chairman of the Committee that recommendations of majority are not likely to be such as Government would consider satisfactory. You are aware of what has occurred in regard to passage allowance. Although vote was ultimately reinstated there can be no assurance that attack will not be renewed next year.

Proceedings of majority of Unofficial Members during last three months cannot but have had disquieting effect on minds of public servants."

The disquietude referred to in the last sentence of my telegram has, no doubt, been largely allayed in the lower grades of the Public Service by the recent adoption of the recommendations of the Salaries Committee in respect of those grades. In the higher grades of the Service, however, with the probable exception of the professional officers of the Medical and Sanitary Department, the disquietude was increased when the Committee's report on Civil List salaries was published, and it has since been further aggravated by the course of a debate in the Legislative Council on the subject of overseas allowances.

4. For reasons which I will indicate I am driven to the conclusion that the Committee which was appointed to revise the salaries and allowances of the Public Services has, in so far as the Civil List services generally are concerned, failed in its task. I appreciate to the full the difficulty of that task, the time and labour which the members of the Committee have ungrudgingly devoted to it, and the genuineness of their desire to arrive at conclusions reasonable from the point of view of the Colony's finances and just to the officers affected. Their failure was really due to causes beyond their control, causes which did not emerge actively until after my despatch of the 2nd June had been written. The members of the Salaries Committee had to frame their recommendations on Civil List salaries at a time of financial strin- gency, which had given rise to a political situation of peculiar strain. Taxation had to be increased, and a General Election was impending in the relatively near future. On all sides there were clamorous demands for economy in administration, and, as is usual in such clamour, everybody wished the economy to be effected at the expense of some person or class in which he himself was not specially interested. One of the particular questions to be reported on that of the passage allowance had actually become involved in acute political controversy before the Committee had signed its report. Under such conditions the application of a purely judicial mind by a body of local politicians would have postulated a power of detachment almost superhuman in quality. It was hardly conceivable that, at such a time and in such an atmosphere, the Ceylonese Unofficial Members would devote as much care and attention to the needs of European as to the needs of Ceylonese officers, or would be as ready to face obloquy for the sake of the former as for the sake of the latter. However that may be, it is a fact that the only large branch of the Service with which the report under consideration deals in a thorough manner is the Department of Medical and Sanitary Services, a department in which there are practically no European Officers. It is true that in this department the range of Civil List salaries is lower than in any other, and the need for amelioration of conditions might therefore be deemed greater, but inevitably an impression has been created in the minds of officers in other departments that, whether consciously or subconsciously, the members of the Committee were

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference :-

TILLHC.O.882/11

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

|ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC

COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO