-5-
146
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 tonement 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 allowance. 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
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.