CO129-569-7 Revision of salaries 6-7-1938 - 11-10-1938 — Page 111

108

page 7.

-5-

8.

The new salaries scheme also provided that rent allowances would be paid to officers on the new terms who might be unable to secure rented tenements at what was

regarded as a reasonable rent; and it is necessary also to provide for the case of an officer entitled to free quarters having to live in an outside tenement and therefore

being entitled to some allowance. We consider it fairest

to treat all officers on the new terms on the same principle

as officers on the old terms, i.e. to make them eligible

for rent allowances equal to the rent actually paid by them, subject to a maximum appropriate to the officer's scale of salary, less the amount, if any, which the officer would be called upon to pay if in occupation of Government quarters General Order 117 will require amendment to carry this into

effect and we attach at the end of this part of our Report

a suggested new General Order in place of it.

9.

While we were considering this General Order our attention was drawn to certain anomalies in the present system of lodging allowano. This allowance constitutes a fixed percentage of an officer's salary up to a maximum and disappears sharply when a salary of £1,200 per year is reached. Up to the maximum the lodging allowance increases as salary increases whereas the general tendency of the rent allowance is to diminish as the officer's salary increases.

As a result at certain salaries the lodging allowance payable to a married man exceeds the maximum rent allowance for which he would be eligible, an obviously unsatisfactory state of affairs. We believe also that the present lodging allowances, particularly in the case of single men, are unduly generous. Finally the present system of rent allowances occasionally results in the drawing by officers on very low scales of salary of allowances which are very large in proportion to the officer's ordinary pay, e.g. an