CO885-8 — Page 216

PUBLE RECORD OFFICE

Reference :-

|།།:།། CO. 885

Printed Confidentially for the use of the Colonial Office.

Miscellaneous

No. 156.

Memorandum on the Organisation and Establishment of the Colonial Office.

|

The Treasury has informally suggested that, having regard to the rapid increase of business in the Colonial Office, and to the fact that it has been necessary during recent years to ask for successive increases of the establishment, it is desirable to consider whether the existing organisation of the office is that which is best adapted to the larger scale on which its business is now transacted and best calculated to secure the full value of the services of the establishment. In order to deal with this question it seems necessary to consider briefly, in the first place, the nature of the present organisation.

2. In the Colonial Office, as in other Government Offices, the staff comprises two main divisions, cor-. responding to the two classes of work, as described in the report of the Ridley Commission in 1888 :-

(1) The "High Staff Officers" (Under Secretaries) and the Higher or First Division Clerks (Class 1), who deal with the "consultative and deliberative work" (as it is called by the Commission), which involves duties more nearly akin to management”; and (2.) The Lower, or Second Division Clerks, who, with certain supplementary classes of clerks and typewriters, deal with the "purely cler- ical work," which "does not differ mate- rially from that done by clerks in large commercial establishments," the "ordinary duties of supervision" in connection with the clerical work being discharged by Lower Staff Officers, selected, as a general rule, from the Second Division Clerks.

As regards the consultative and deliberative work, the basis of the organisation of the Colonial Office is the distribution of this work geographically between Departments each consisting normally of

4 Upper Division Clerks; viz.:

1 Principal Clerk (usually called Head of a

Department).

1 First Class Clerk (Senior).

2 Second Class Clerks (Juniors).

There is also a General Department, consisting partly of Upper Division and partly of Second Division Clerks. The number of Departments is determined by the amount of work which a Principal Clerk can be expected to master in all its details. The existing number has been based upon the understanding that this amount of work is repre- sented on an average by about 5,000 registered papers a year. But at present all the Departments except one have mòre than 5,000 paper ; and one

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CORD OFFICE, LONDON