CO129-611-5 Development Secretariat- appointment of registrar of Co-operatives 10-3-1947 - 10-3-1948 — Page 56

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at this is by any means the case. The Development Secretariat in Hong Kong is not on all foure with Development Secretariats in other colonies, in the: sense that it is concerned exclusively with development. You will see from the 1947/48 Estimates that it comprises a Directorate, an Agricultural Department, a Fisheries Department, a Forestry Department and a Gardens Department (we are now as you know proposing to add a Co-operation Department). Before the war all these small existing Departments, many of them virtually one-man Departments,, were responsible direct to the Colonial Secretariat, but the more convenient and efficient arrangement has now been adopted of bringing them all under the direction and supervision of one officer, the Secretary for Development. Clearly however, notwithstanding this re-organisation and the new nomenclature for the Department, each of its component sub-Departments is carrying on with its normal routine administrative work: there are no other Departments outside the Development Secretariat concerned with the routine administrative work of Forestry, Agriculture, Fisheries, Gardens, etc., such as you find in a territory organised on a normal colonial lines. At a guess I should say that this Ordinary routine administrative work must account for a very large proportion of the work of the Development Secretariat: what the exact relative proportion is as between administration and development we could not of course say without consulting Hong Kong. However, beyond drawing your attention to this matter in very general terms at this stage I do not wish to pursue the point for the moment, but it will obviously be an important factor which we shall have to take into account when we come to examine the extent to which it

may