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our Establishment, that present conditions warrant an increase
rather than a reduction of Salaries.
II. Prospects.
6. With regard to our prospects reference is made in paragraph 24 of the above Report to a principle quoted in a despatch from the Secretary of State namely:-
"It is proper that in a service which purports to provide
a permanent career, officers should be able to look forward to reasonable prospects of promotiɔn.
But the obligations of
the Government do not extend beyond the provision of such prospects, and no officer can be held to have a claim, as of right, to the maintenance of any particular salary scale for a post which he does not hold. There are indeed objections of principle to recognising any such claim and obvious administrative difficulties in the way of retaining for an indefinite period
two salary scales for officers performing identical functions, the more favourable being reserved for officers whose only claim to preferential treatment is that they were in the Hong Kong Service when the change was made".
7. We consider this principle to imply that Government is under a moral obligation to provide (a) reasonable chances of promotion which will also give (b) reasonable increases in emoluments on promotion and (c) that emoluments of all grades would be maintained unless reasonable grounds for changing them
exist.
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8.
Regarding (a) we submit that many Engineers have no chance of promotion before retirement, due to heavy recruitment shortly after the war and no increase in the number of higher
posts.
9. With reference to (b) we are of the opinion that while both old and proposed groups of scales satisfy this principle, promotion from the old to the proposed scales does not.
and
10. Dealing with (c)/the second sentence of the above quotation from the Secretary of State's despatch we submit that
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