PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
These six categories would together only yield 1113 places to be reallocated, but all the remaining categories in Annex C3 seem to qualify under the broad description "Professional and business people, people working in educational and health services, and those with particular technical and managerial skills" used by the Foreign Secretary on 20 December. If Ministers wanted to reallocate further places, they might first look at the various categories of "associate professionals", who are the less qualified people in the various professions. The biggest such group is "23. Business administration accounting and legal associate professionals" which includes, for example, sales representatives and lawyers' clerks, and accounts for 4,194 places. Information science associate professionals might also be jettisoned but there are special reasons for keeping the health associate professionals and the engineering associate professionals.
1.
Beyond that, it would only be possible to find more places for "business skills" by squeezing the other categories harder than their emigration rates justified: this would not produce many places and would alienate support in Hong Kong.
Key entrepreneurs
8. It is common ground that provision will have to be made for major entrepreneurs, for whom the criteria of the general
allocation scheme would not be appropriate. In his OD (K) paper the Home Secretary suggested that the Governor should simply be given a discretion to nominate people when he was satisfied that they had an outstanding claim, but Mr Powell criticises this as
'some sort of after thought" and he suggests that the Prime Minister believes that the general allocation scheme should embrace entrepreneurs.
9.
It seems extremely difficult to accommodate major entrepreneurs in the general allocation scheme without constructing so many special provisions for them that the integrity of the scheme is even further weakened. If the Home Secretary agrees, the best course seems to persist with the proposition that these people should be dealt with in a separate free-standing category, on the face of the Bill, and that this could be given more prominence in the general presentation of the whole arrangements. In effect, we would replace a general discretion for the Governor by something that included criteria relating to importance to the economy of Hong Kong (and, in fact, it might well have been necessary to have included something of this kind in any event).
10. It may be that the Prime Minister will ask what numbers the Home Secretary has in mind for this category. We are not in a
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
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