Sessional_Paper_1948 — Page 42

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(ii) Local professional officers with more than ten years service should be allowed to accumulate their annual leave up to six months in order to enable them to take refresher courses or to study the latest developments in their professions.

(iii) Where study leave is granted under the above recommendations,

return passages and tuition fees should be paid by Government. (iv) Officers who are granted study leave under these recommendations should be required to enter into an undertaking to continue in Government service for at least five years after the completion of the study leave granted to them.

SICK LEAVE

157. The only representation on this matter that we received related rather to the form than to the operation of the sick leave rules. It was represented that a man suffering from a slow moving disease is left uncertain by the terms in which the rules are framed whether he will get ample sick leave to give him a chance of complete recovery and that this uncertainty might be a factor in retarding a cure. It was not alleged that the rules had ever been applied in a way that justified any such fear; in fact the evidence we received showed that the Government was accustomed to interpret them liberally. If the rules were redrafted in the sense suggested it would involve no change in Government practice and therefore we suggest that a revision might be considered.

158. We are of opinion that the sick leave rules should contain special provision for officers suffering from tuberculosis, a disease of wide incidence in Hong Kong. Government servants are at present accommodated for long periods of curative treatment in the Queen Mary Hospital, a general hospital, with the result that its accommodation and resources are strained. We should welcome an ample provision of sanatorium accommodation for Government servants and for the public generally. Meantime we consider that a man should be assured that his sick leave will be terminated only if it is found necessary to invalid him out of the service.

LOCAL LEAVE

159. Evidence showed how relatively little men have been accustomed to take advantage of short annual leave. Hong Kong is not well placed. To escape from summer heat and humidity an officer has had to travel to Japan, to distant places in China, to the Philippines or to Indo-China, at great expense and frequently with a good deal of discomfort. At present few of these places are accessible. Short leave spent in Hong Kong is hardly more than extended absence from office duty; which in itself is not commonly of much profit to mind or body. There are administrative difficulties against releasing more than a fraction of the officers who may wish to take leave at the time of the year at which the leave most profitably can be taken. Further we had evidence that there is a tendency to regard the man who uses his annual leave for the purpose for which it was given as selfish because he leaves some other person to do his work, a point of view equally irrational and vicious. It is in the public interest that officers should take local leave: the provision is ample: our only recom- mendation is that, as conditions in the area improve, officers should be encouraged to take the local leave due to them.

PASSAGES

160. We do not recommend any fundamental changes in the rules govern- ing the provision of passages. Some amendment to General Order 197 (2) will be required as the result of the revision of salaries. We propose that expatriate stenographers on the permanent establishment should be granted leave and passages on the same terms as other expatriate officers. We consider that the privilege of free fares to certain destinations at present enjoyed by Police and Prisons officers when proceeding on or returning from leave in the United Kingdom and Ireland should be abolished, if the officers concerned elect to come on the new salary scales and terms of service.

161. We recommend that expatriate officers should be allowed to opt in ordinary circumstances whether to travel by sea or air when proceeding on or returning from home leave, but that air travel should not be compulsory unless in any particular case it is necessitated by the exigencies of the service. In view of the extra cost to Government of air travel we recommend that officers on leave travelling by air should not be allowed the normal standard voyage allow- ance but only the actual number of days spent on the flight. The possibilities of delay owing to bad flying weather and the differences in the time schedules of the various air lines would seem to preclude the prescription of a standard flight allowance.