TNAG-0592-FCO40-725-Inspection-of-Hong-Kong-and-Indian-Ocean-Department-1976 — Page 107

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ADMINISTRATION IN CONFIDENCE

The workload has fallen off since July, and the figures for the period 4 July to 31 October are:

IN

OUT

Gibraltar

35

13

Administrative Staffing

38

29

General

27

22

ILO

12

11

5. These figures are very low, even taking the large amount of outgoing correspondence into consideration. Miss Jackson, on the integrated General desk, has only sufficient registry work to keep her occupied for 2-3 hours a day and the addition of the ILO work to her section would not make any appreciable difference. The Administrative Staffing section is fairly busy during the recruiting period, but only about 30% of the correspondence received is given full registration, the remainder is dealt with on PF files, which are run on a modified system. We have also recommended in paragraph 10 below that some other correspondence is no longer given full registration but treated ephemerally. This section, therefore, also has some spare capacity. The work on the Gibraltar section fluctuates, but the Registry Officer is rarely fully extended and could easily absorb more work.

6. All three Registry Officers are, therefore, under-employed.

As things stand, however, with the General section integrated, it is not possible to recommend any alteration in the Grade 10 complement. We consider it would be wasteful of manpower to integrate the other two desks in the hope that the Registry Officers would be fully occupied with extra departmental work. We therefore recommend that this Department should be served by a central registry consisting of two Grade 10 Officers and that the integrated desk should be abolished. We do not consider that this small Registry requires its own Grade 9, and we recommend the abolition of this post. Supervision in future could be carried out by the Registrar's Branch.

7. The registry duties which are done by Mrs Rudd, the Clerical Assistant, can easily be taken on by the Registry Officers themselves and no doubt other arrangements can be made for someone to do the few tasks she does for the department (amendments to the Office Directory etc). We therefore recommend that when Mrs Rudd retires in March next year she is not replaced.

8.

We understand that some reorganisation of the Department is being considered, and this could well affect the above recommendations

PROCEDURES

9.

A list of the lapses in procedures which we found appears as an Annex to the Report.

ADMINISTRATION IN CONFIDENCE

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