HC Deb 02 April 1903 vol 120 cc959-65
MR. D. A. THOMAS (Merthyr Tydvil)

said he desired to direct the attention of the Government to the Amendment which stood in his name. He wished the Secretary to the Treasury to understand that in bringing the matter forward he was not acting in any hostile spirit. It had been repeatedly recommended by Royal Commissions that the salaries of the upper division of officials in the Civil Service should be made uniform; and, although he should like to see that done, he only asked an assurance that the salaries of the upper division officials in two very important Departments, the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade, should be assimilated as far as possible to the recommendations of the Commissions. This was a matter which not only affected individuals, but also affected efficiency in perhaps the two most important Departments of the State. He should like to trace the development of the upper division of the Civil Service. Fifty years ago the Civil Service was in a very different position to what it was now. Then, there was no division between the intellectual work and the clerical routine work, and men of high qualifications were not attracted to the Service. In 1854 Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote were appointed to report on its condition, and they said— Admission into the Civil Service is indeed eagerly sought for, but it is for the unambitious and the indolent and incapable that it is chiefly desired. Those whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in the open professions where they must encounter the competition of their contemporaries, and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirmities unfit for active exertions, are placed in the Civil Service, where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with little labour and with no risk. To-day the Civil Service was one of the finest in the world. The men in it were largely drawn from public schools and universities, and from an educational point of view compared favourably with men in other avocations, and certainly with the average member of the so-called learned professions. The Commissioners recommended in 1854 (1) The separation of intellectual and mechanical labour, and (2) The selection of clerks by open competition. These two principles had ever since been regarded as essential, and were the foundation on which subsequent Royal Commissions reported. In 1835 the Civil Service Commission was established to examine candidates; and later, by Order of Council, almost unrestricted competitive examination was made the door of entry into the Civil Service. In 1874 the Playfair Commission was appointed to consider the organisation of the Civil Service, and that Commission reaffirmed the recommendations of Sir George Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote, and recommended a uniform scale of pay throughout the service. These are the words— The rate of remuneration to be paid in the Higher Division should be such as would attract men of a liberal education, who would otherwise go into the open professions. These rates of pay should be uniform throughout the service. In 1886, a very strong Royal Commission was appointed, known as the Ridley Commission, which again reaffirmed the recommendations of the Playfair Commission, and used these words— We think it an object of the most serious importance that men of the same standard of liberal education as those who now adopt the open professions, should be attracted into the public service and trained there for selection for the highest permanent posts. It was this scale he asked the Treasury now to adopt in these two Departments. He did not think it had been adopted altogether in the War Office and the Admiralty, but it had been adopted in the Scotch Office and the Irish Office, and he maintained that the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade were infinitely more important than either the Scotch or Irish Offices, in which this scale had been adopted. He would like to know why the recommendation had not been carried out. He had endeavoured to find that out and had asked the predecessor of the hon. Gentleman this question— To state the grounds on which any distinctions are drawn between the higher officials of the various Departments having regard to the fact that they are all recruited by the same examination and for the same class of work. The Postmaster-General, who then occupied the position of the hon. Gentleman, in reply referred him to Parliamentary Paper 575 of 1894 for a full account of the action taken on the Report of the Royal Commission, and of the reasons for it, and stated that no change was contemplated at the present time. Upon referring to that Paper he found this— The Treasury does not contemplate absolute uniformity of scale, but in cases where Departments have made very large reductions of numbers, has felt justified in improving the scale of salary so as to approximate more closely to the figures recommended by the Royal Commission. On the principle, he supposed, of less work and more pay. In the previous year, or the year before that, he put a question on this subject to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board who replied— The examination for the clerks of the upper division of the Local Government Board is the same as that for clerks of the same division in the offices of the Secretaries of State, with the exception of the Foreign Office, and so far as I am aware the class of work performed by the clerks in these several offices is similar in character. Some reduction in the number of the upper division clerks in the Local Government Board was made between 1884 and 1897, but in that year the large growth in the work rendered it essential that a considerable increase should be made in the staff of the office, including the upper division. But the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, the present Postmaster-General, subsequently said that All clerks of the upper division are recruited by examinations on the same subjects. Vacancies in the offices of the Secretaries of State are filled by the most successful candidates, or by the transfer from other Departments of officers who have shown exceptional merit. In the opinion of the Treasury the work in the offices of the Secretaries of State, taken as a whole, requires higher qualifications than does that of other public departments. So that the House would see that the Financial Secretary of that day held an exactly contrary opinion. He thought the distinctions drawn between the offices of the Secretaries of State and the other big Departments was largely historical and not real; largely a matter of tradition rather than of fact. In his opinion it was opposed both to the interests of the State, and the interest of the Departments that there should be this distinction drawn in the scale of the salaries paid.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL (Tyrone, S.)

said that this question was raised at considerable length before the Reorganisation Committee of the Local Government Board, of which he was a Member, and that was his only excuse for intervening. At the time it was raised it came as a surprise to him, and he could never understand why an upper division clerk in the Local Government Board, or the Board of Trade, was pecuniarily in a worse position than the same class of clerk in the offices of a Secretary of State. The point he desired to force on the Secretary to the Treasury, independent of those which had been emphasised by the hon. Gentleman opposite, was that this system worked prejudicially in the case of the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade. There was a constant state of transfer going on. Clerks who had learnt their business in those offices, when they found they could get better pay in the offices of a Secretary of State naturally used all the influence in their power to get transferred; the result was the great offices of State got the best men, who had learned their work in other Departments, whilst the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade had to bring in men who had to be taught their business, which was most prejudicial to those Departments.

THE FINANCIAL SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY (Mr. HAYES FISHER,) Fulham

said he cordially joined in the tribute that had been paid by the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydvil to the Civil Service. Those who had had anything to do with the civil administration could not but admire the zeal, ability, and courtesy which those gentlemen brought to the administration of their Departments. The hon. Gentleman did not defend his Motion at all on any deterioration of the Civil Service, or the falling off of the high standard of excellence for which the country had so long been accustomed to look. The high testimony which had been given by the hon. Gentleman was amply borne out by the statistics upon this subject, which showed that it was very rarely that any one obtained a position in the upper division of the Civil Service who had not at least one first class to his credit at his university. He frankly admitted that if the hon. Gentleman looked for anomalies, both in the pay and the prizes of the Civil Service, he would find them. The British Constitution was full of anomalies, and it would be strange indeed if those who were responsible for its administration had not some taint of the disease. He admitted that if they took the pay-sheets of the upper division of the Civil Service and looked through the pay and prizes offered to candidates that came into our big Departments, of which there were nineteen, it would be found that the pay and the prizes varied in an extraordinary degree. Some inequalities existed that it would be very difficult to give a reason for. There were nineteen big offices, in five of which, namely, the Treasury, the Colonial Office, the Home Office, the Scotch Office, and the Irish Office, the commencing salary was £200; in the other fourteen it was £150. What the hon. Gentleman now sought to do was to raise the initial salary of the juniors entering the upper division of the Civil Service from £150 to £200. But though the hon. Member had limited his Motion to the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade, if he considered his arguments he would find that the case could not rest there; the hon. Gentleman said that he defied any one to prove that the work done in those two offices was of an inferior order to that done in the Colonial and Home Offices; but it would be equally difficult to prove that the work done was of a superior order to that done in the Admiralty and the War Office. The Treasury had already been approached by the clerks in the War Office, and they had complained that they were not given the same high salaries as were given in the Colonial Office. He thought the work of the Treasury was of a very high order, and he did not think anybody in that office was over-paid; but he could not say, nor could anyone else, that all the work done at the five great offices of State where higher salaries were paid was of a higher order than the work done at the Local Government Board or the Board of Trade. The hon. Member asked "Why not adopt a scheme of uniform pay?" The reason was pretty obvious. There was not the slightest ground for saying we did not get a good article for the price we paid. Then there was the Treasury argument of the cost. To pay 200 junior officials at the rate of from £150 to £200 a year would mean an additional expenditure of £10,000 per annum. Nor would it stop there. If the higher scale were adopted in these offices a formidable request for similar treatment would at once be made by first-class offices, which were somewhat analogous, such as the British Museum, and, adding other incidental expenses, an increase of £30,000 a year would probably have to be faced. That was certainly a matter for reflection, seeing that up to the present the country had obtained admirable service for the money now paid.

It was true that the Ridley Commission, on whose report the hon. Member had founded his argument, recommended a certain scale of salaries, but (in paragraphs 52 and 56) it also laid great stress on the fact that before that increased scale was adopted a large reduction ought to take place in the upper division of the Civil Service. The attitude then taken up by the Treasury was that, while not altogether averse to introducing for the junior officials the scale of the Ridley Commission, at all events in the largest Departments, they must insist on the upper division being largely cut down before they did so. Between 21st March 1890 and 18th December, 1893, in six of the largest Government Departments there were 112 vacancies in the upper division, of which the Departments themselves, in concert with the Treasury, said it was not necessary to fill up ninety-seven. That showed that the pressure brought to bear by the Ridley Commission, supported by the Treasury, had been instrumental in saving a great deal of money without sacrificing anything in the way of efficiency. He desired to take up the same attitude on the present occasion. While not thinking it necessary to apply one uniform standard to all the large offices, he did not take up a stubborn attitude of opposition to the extension of the system to some of the larger offices. Each office must be treated on its own merits and make out its own case, but the Treasury would naturally expect it to show that it had effected as much economy as it could reasonably be expected to do. As to the proposal to adopt the scale for the Board of Trade and the Local Government Board, he would remind his hon. friend the Member for South Tyrone that in 1897 he was a consenting party to keep the initial salary of the second class at £150.

MR. T. W. RUSSELL

said that on a Committee such as that to which the hon. Member referred there had to be a good deal of give and take on both sides, and most members had to consent to things which they did not think strictly fair in order to arrive at a general agreement.

MR. HAYES FISHER

fully accepted the hon. Gentleman's explanation, perhaps he did not agree with that particular part of the Report. It was impossible not to recognise the ever-increasing value of the work done by the Board of Trade and the Local Government Board, and he hoped hon. Members would be satisfied with the statement that the Government had promised to appoint a Committee to inquire into the position and the duties of the Board of Trade and the Local Government Board, and to report whether any, and if so, what, alterations should be made in the constitution and status of those offices. It was impossible for the Government to accept a mandatory Motion to raise the initial salaries of the second class until this Committee had made its inquiry and issued its report. Speaking generally he might say that the Government would at any time be willing to consider the request of any of the big offices, on its own merits, for the application of the Ridley scale to the second class, but they would also insist that the Department should be willing to adopt in spirit and in substance the main recommendations of the Ridley Commission, so that for expenditure on the one side there would be reasonable economy on the other.