2 April 1992
Mrs S Brown
HM Treasury Parliament Street
LONDON
SW1
Sandra
HMOCS: COMPENSATION SCHEME
CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
File
203
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 071-
HKA
233/1
1.
As you know we were most grateful to you for arranging the meeting on 28 February to discuss the details of this scheme. We have since reflected carefully on the various ideas raised for minimising the cost of the scheme, maximising its effectiveness, and ensuring as far as possible that the consultation process with the officers concerned does not pose new problems in these or other respects.
2. I am glad to say that the issues raised have all proved relatively straight-forward, so we have not had to trouble you for further financial advice. We have now decided to open consultations in Hong Kong on 7 April by having a brief face to face meeting with the HMOCS Association Committee. Nigel Cox is currently in Hong Kong on other business and will stay on for a day to do this. We shall hand over an opening statement of our position (see below). This will subsequently be circulated to all officers with an interest. We shall invite written comments on this and then again send a small team to Hong Kong, probably in the week of 4 May, for detailed consultations. Our team for the consultations will be a joint FCO/ODA one. If you saw value in including Grant Ballantyne from the Government Actuary's Department and, assuming he is available that the Treasury were able to meet the costs of his participation, we should be very happy for him to join us. Thereafter we shall put final details of the scheme to you for clearance before notifying the officers concerned: the timing will be tight if they are to have an opportunity for reflection before the 30 June deadline for pension decisions. We hope we can let them know the position
in the first week of June.
3. I enclose for your information a copy of the statement we will send to the officers concerned. The paragraphs below provide some background on our approach.
NC2ACB
CONFIDENTIAL
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.