PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
4. As the Home Secretary knows, it is very highly desirable that the Governor should be made responsible for the administration of the scheme. This is not only to avoid the Home Secretary and his successors being responsible for all the day-to-day details of this until 1997, but also so that the scheme can be presented to Parliament as being devised by the Governor, and not having to be spelt out in detail on the face of the Bill.
5. There are basically two ways in which the proportion of "business people" and those "with managerial skills" could be increased at the expense of the rest:
Option A
This would simply involve pruning out the occupational categories that are thought to be least politically acceptable, and then using the emigration figures to reallocate those numbers to the other categories.
Option B
This would be an entirely subjective option, with numbers of places in each category determined solely by political judgement.
There is, perhaps, no absolute hard and fast line between the two approaches, since any pruning of categories from the standardised list would be a subjective judgement. But, the closer the scheme is to Option A the more the Governor will feel able to support it as representing Hong Kong's needs, while the closer it is to Option B the greater the pressure that will be on him to repudiate it on the grounds that it reflects only a UK immigration perspective.
6.
Of the categories displayed in Annex C3 of the Home Secretary's OD (K) paper, the following categories can probably now be struck out:
26.
14.
Performers and entertainment and sports personnel
Social work professionals
15. Writers and creative artists
17. Religion professionals
24.
Social work associate professionals
16.
Archivists, librarians, translators and interpreters
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