CONFIDENTIAL
practice). In terms of retaining beyond 1997 key personnel who may be adversely affected by the approach of 1997, you will be aware of the expensive schemes of limited compensation and the Special Branch. The Hong Kong Government have also made specific efforts to maintain an effective police force with high morale. Police pay has increased approximately 70% over the last five years, some 20% more than most other civil servants. A further request for improvement of police salaries is now being considered, against a background of widespread concern about the level of violent crime. But public concern tends to focus on rank and file police recruitment and there is less sympathy for senior grades in the police force or the civil service generally. Nonetheless HKG is doing what it can, and our compensation scheme can only supplement their efforts - the key points remaining that it is politically impossible for HKG to target expatriates and that any significant improvement in civil service terms of service must, if there is not to be discontinuity in 1997, be the subject of consultations with China (and the Chinese have in the past suggested that the burden of civil service pay and pensions is already too high).
11. Since HKG cannot help further with the contract officers, we have therefore considered whether it would be possible to envisage HMG improving the contract terms. However we have come up against several objections to this!
(a) We could not publicly admit that our objective was to keep these officers out of the HMOCS net, so we would have to present the scheme as aimed at giving expatriates an incentive to stay in Hong Kong as a further British contribution to a smooth transition etc. However hundreds of other expatriate contract officers in Hong Kong would then seek to benefit too, and we would have no good grounds for refusing.
(b) The Chinese would be very likely to object strenuously. For HMG to pay supplements to contract officers employed by the Hong Kong SARG would be something quite different from our proposals for compensation and would lack their justification of precedent. The Chinese would probably argue that the payment of such supplements was improper on general political grounds and also was contrary to the Joint Declaration which states that privileged treatment for foreign nationals would not be maintained.
(c) To be sustainable and to fit in with our proposals for HMOCS members, HMG could only start making enhanced payments to contract officers after 1997. But HMG would have no control over whether these officers were offered renewed contracts. What would our position be if, through no fault of their own, the officers were not offered new contracts? We could find ourselves in a legal quagmire.
NC2ACB
CONFIDENTIAL
Page 75Page 76
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.