CONFIDENTIAL
Your Ref: cst.ps/let/1pw3.7
Our Ref:
17 July 1992
HKA 233/1
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone: 071-
270-2650
Kevin Woodfield Esq
HM Treasury Parliament Street London SW1
Dear Kevin,
HM OVERSEAS CIVIL SERVICE (HMOCS), HONG KONG:
HMG PACKAGE
458
1. Thank you for your letter of 13 July, which we received on 15 July. It was helpful of you to set out your thoughts in this way; we too had been considering how best to meet our Ministerial remit.
2. Our understanding of the position reached at the Ministerial meeting on 2 July, as recorded in Peter Wanless's letter of 3 July to Simon Gass, is that officials should now draw up a range of costed options for further consideration by Ministers.
3.
In our view it will be best if we concentrate on producing a paper which lists relevant options and which estimates, as best we can, the cost or potential cost of each. It would not be a good use of our time to attempt to agree passages of prose commenting on these options: we wasted far too much time on such an exercise last winter.
4. I therefore now enclose a draft paper showing a range of options, including those mentioned in the attachment to your letter, and their likely costs. We need to check some of the figures with Hong Kong, but that should not delay our forming a view on whether this draft is in the right sort of format. (We take it that you share our wish to settle these questions as quickly as possible.) Moreover, in the light of your letter, it seems to us that there are some gaps which only HMT can fill in.
CONFIDENTIAL
466
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