21.
CONFIDENTIAL
Resettlement (and Housing)
Social Welfare
Urban Council and Urban Services.
Not all of these thirteen have the same priority or the same requirements. In several the direction of information work is less to the general public than to the people for whom the department works. For example the Registry of Trade Unions is mainly concerned with Trade Unions as such but may need professional help in producing suitable informational material.
22.
The same may be said of some of the function of the Agricultural and Labour Departments who, however, also have general public information problems.
23.
At the other end of the scale are departments dealing with the issues which represent, in the eyes of the public, the progress of the community and the Government's care for the people. They are notably:
24.
Fublic Works
Education
Medical and Health
Social Welfare
Labour
Resettlement
Urban Council and Urban Services
These seven departments ought to be provided with their own public information and publicity units, who would receive general policy guidance from the Information Secretary, and share the common services of the specialist publicity services but who would work on a day-to-day basis as departmental spokesman and initiators of publicity projects.
25.
The size and scale of these units will depend on the nature of the task and also on the number of staff already partly engaged on publicity work. For example there are already several people engaged in the U.S.D. on the preparation of publicity material and similar activi- ties are also undertaken within several other departments.
26.
However each of these units ought to be handled by a man equivalent in grade to the I.S.D.'s present Principal Information officer. Below their grade one cannot expect the standard of policy advice which the head of a large and important department is entitled to expect.
/The
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