ENG-1980 — Page 325

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CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION

is to see that, after consultation with interested groups in the community, the government is provided with the best possible advice on which to base its decisions. As a consequence, nearly all government departments are assisted by advisory bodies of some kind.

Government officials and members of the public are both represented on these committees - the members of the public being appointed on account of specialist knowledge or expertise, or through their record or interest in contributing to the life of the community.

While the membership of a committee is generally reviewed when a member's term of office expires, a more systematic and regular monitoring of the composition and effective- ness of these bodies is now planned. This is in keeping with the growing number and im- portance of advisory committees as the work of the government increases in range and complexity.

Advisory bodies are divided into four broad categories: appeal boards (such as the Education Appeals Board, or the Board of Review Long Term Prison Sentences); those which deal with the interests of a particular industry (such as the Construction Industry Training Authority and the Fish Marketing Advisory Board); committees which advise on government action (Special Committee on Land Production and the Commodities Trading Commissiōn); and others which share common interests in a particular locality (such as area and neighbourhood committees in the urban areas and the New Territories, district advisory and area committees, and neighbourhood Fight Crime committees).

Civil Service

The civil service provides the staff for all government departments and other units of the administration. During the 1979-80 financial year, the number of posts in the civil service grew from 134,700 to 141,700, an increase of 5.2 per cent. Recruitment was maintained at a high level and the number of officers also increased by 5.2 per cent during the same period, from 122,800 to 129,200. Of the total strength, 97.7 per cent were local officers. This indicated that, at that time, one person in every 17 of the estimated adult working popula- tion - or one in 39 of the total population - was employed by the government.

The civil service contains a large element of labourers, semi-skilled workers and artisans of one kind or another; their posts total 37,400. The Hong Kong civil service is somewhat unusual in that it does some jobs which in other territories and administrations are done by people who do not belong to the civil service. Elsewhere, for example, staff for hospitals, public works and utilities, urban cleansing and public health, and the police, are not always servants of the central government. In Hong Kong, the Medical and Health Department (17,400), the Public Works Department (17,500), the Urban Services Department (22,600) and the Royal Hong Kong Police Force (24,800) account for a total of 82,300 posts about 58 per cent of the entire civil service.

The number of people working in the civil service has grown from 17,500 in 1949, to about 69,000 in 1967, and now to more than 129,000. This reflects both the continuing expansion of existing services, in line with the increasing population, and the development of new services to meet changing needs.

The cost of the civil service is reflected in the expenditure on personal emoluments. For the 1980-1 financial year, this is estimated to be about $4,065 million, excluding pensions. This is about 38 per cent of the total estimated recurrent expenditure for the year.

Although claim for more pay is usually the major cause of confrontation between ad- ministration and staff in the civil service, the strengthening of staff management is seen as an important element in preventing disputes. A Staff Management Division was therefore established in the Civil Service Branch of the Government Secretariat in May, 1980, with