(DEFENCE AND EXTERNAL AFFAIRS SUB-COMMITTEE)
February, 1975.] Mr. A. P. HOCKADAY, C.B., C.M.G.,
[Continued.
Rear Admiral A. S. MORTON, Mr. T. CULLEN, Mr. D. M. EVANS, Mr. G. C. B. DODDS, Mr. A. R. M. JAFFRAY, Mr. J. D. BRYARS and Mr. T. C. G. JAMES, C.M.G.
189. On locally entered civilians, with- out asking for information now I won- der if we could have a note showing where 15,000 are coming from, because it goes back to a question asked last week as to whether our getting out of places like Gan might impose a heavy burden of unemployment which we would then have to make up? Could we have the breakdown?-Yes, certainly.
Dr. Miller.
190. Do I take it in view of the fact that UK civilians constitute a lower proportion than any of the other services and since therefore the proportion of civilians as opposed to servicemen in the forces increases, it is possible for civi- lians to undertake to a certain extent some of the duties of servicemen? Secondly, of the 14,000
14,000 UK based civilians who are going to lose their jobs, be declared redundant by 1st April, 1979, I hope they are not going to come out of that number of civilians in the Minis- try of Defence who are going to be dis- persed to other parts of the kingdom so that then the Ministry of Defence will -On say, we have no one to disperse? your first question, we are indeed always alive to the possibility of employing civilians in jobs which have been filled by servicemen. There are a number of areas in which we do employ civilians in jobs which in a number of other coun- tries are done by uniformed people. We are certainly alive to this. On Dr. Miller's second question, I would like to pick up his suggestion that the 14,000 people shown here are going to be re- dundant. These figures in the right hand column are not figures of redundancy, they are figures of reductions. They could certainly be described as job losses, but it is intended as far as possible to effect reductions by normal wastage, and
so on.
191. I was looking at the locally entered civilians who will be redundant?
-That means outside the UK.
192. What about the dispersal point? -Having said that the redundancy of UK based civilians we would expect to be considerably less than the figure given here I would just add that there is no connection between this and what has
been policy.
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announced regarding dispersal
Mr. Roper.
193. If we look at paragraph 46, the annual savings for four years up to 1979 are going to be of the order of £350 m. Still on the same paragraph 41 but just using the figure of £350 m. as being the approximate level of savings in each year up to 1979, if in fact the Government had decided to make savings of the amount of £1,000 m. a year, something approximately three times as great as this, would we assume that the reduction in force level would be approximately three times as great, and in those circumstances would there be redundancies? -On the question of the implications of a reduction in defence expenditure of £1,000 m. I could say a good deal, but I will try to confine myself to the precise question asked. We have looked at this; it is difficult to judge exactly what would be the implications in terms of a reduction of numbers of personnel, and so on, because if one had to effect economies of this order of mag- nitude in a reasonably short time scale one would have completely to re-think the whole structure. The kind of forces that we should have and the kind of commitments that we could undertake would be considerably different. But having uttered that cautionary note and pointed out that the figures I am going to give are pretty rough and ready and arbitrary, we judge that in those circum- stances the reductions of numbers would be something not far short of 150,000 service men and perhaps of the order of 100,000 directly employed civilians. This is without getting on to the implications for the defence related industries. But while with the kind of reduction figures that are set out in paragraph 41 we would hope to be able to keep redundancy within fairly limited bounds, if we had to make reductions of the order of virtually a quarter of a million of our employees, the number who would be made redundant would obviously be very large and by the same token so would the bill for redundancy payments.
194. As there are only 60,000 locally entered civilians, even if all of them
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