TNAG-0822-FCO40-1029-Policy-on-salaries-for-civil-servants-in-Hong-Kong-1978 — Page 442

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香港下亞畢道

*** OUR REF.: AP 221/2-C II

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Dear Mr. Thompson,

42

GOVERNMENT SECRETARIAT

LOWER ALBERT ROAD

HONG KONG

HKK 430/1

RECEIVED IN REGISTRY NO. 51

2 3 MAY 1978

DESK OFFICER

INDEX

PA

Thank you for your letter of 21st April 1978

REGISTRY

Action Taken

which Martin Rowlands has seen and has asked me to answer on his behalf. You enclosed a letter from "Local Government Officers of Hong Kong". There is no local association by this name and the letter appears to be anonymous. However, the following background information may be of interest to you. In addition, the annual reports on the Civil Service and on the Public Services Commission provide considerable information.

As you noticed, the question of localisation in the Hong Kong Civil Service was raised in the Budget debate this year.

I attach for your information an extract of the Hon. Lydia Dunn's speech on this subject, together with a copy of my reply in which I clarified the Government's policy on localisation, and outlined the progress made and the difficulties encountered in its implementation.

Statistics on the number of local officers at the senior professional and management level just below the Directorate are encouraging. There are now 435 local officers (59.5% of the total), as against 131 (39.2% of the total) as at October 1969.

You will have seen during your recent visit and it is nice now to be able to put a face to your name! the enormous scale and pace of development going on here and you may agree that it is something of an achievement to have been able to tackle these programmes with relatively little reliance on importing skills from overseas. Points

1 and 3 in the sixth paragraph of the anonymous letter amount to a policy of wholesale and early localisation for its own sake, regardless of its effects on the ability of departments to carry out their functions and so on. Such an extreme policy would receive little support here; we need all the talent we can get, and Hong Kong is clearly unlike other former dependent territories in that it is not moving towards self-government and independence.

J. Thompson, Esq., MBE,

Hong Kong and General Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office,

London, SW1,

ENGLAND.

/However,