STAFF IN CONFIDENCE
Mr Quantrill
Personnel Operations Department
Enter
HKA 431/25....
Na
10
STAFFING OF DEPENDENT TERRITORIES
G
1. Thank you for your minute of 11 May to Mr McQuade who is away. He will be incorporating your thoughts into the submission to the Chief Clerk. I quite agree that the exercise which you mention in paragraph 3 of your minute should be helpful in attracting more people and we will indeed mention this in the submission. I also strongly support the idea that we should get away from the idea that Dependent Territories posts are only for volunteers. Until we make it clear that policy regards such posts as part of a normal career pattern, people will bound to be scared away.
2. I take the point in your paragraph 5 but I still think that we have got to be careful to avoid any suggestion that responsible officers in Dependent Territories need not be of very high quality. It may be a question of semantics and one can argue about what is meant by the higher reaches of the Service. But we know only too well the difficulties that can arise in Dependent Territories where Governors in particular are not politically adroit, tough and at the same time sufficiently subtle to deal with awkward Chief Ministers. Problems in Dependent Territories can cause more difficulties for our own Ministers than many more imposing world issues. I would certainly therefore want to maintain the view that people sent to such posts should be of 'high quality' Wherever possible, I think they should be people who will go on to the Senior Grade, not officers who are expected to end up in Grade 4.
12 May 1982
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Slip
R D Clift
Hong Kong and General Department
"Thank you. We would certainly not quarrel with the description "high" (as opposed to "top") quality. In looking for candidates, we shall certainly not limit ourselves to people whose ceiling is Grade 4, though, as in the past, I world expect to find perfectly suitable candidates in that Category from time to time (e.g. Notong and N Godden ).
STAFF IN CONFIDENCE
W. Chancill
1375
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