§ MR. FIELDTo ask the Secretary to the Treasury whether, seeing that civil servants must look for promotion principally in the Departments to which they are assigned, that before the Treasury could entertain a proposal to promote an assistant clerk in one Department, on the ground of special merit, to the Second Division, with a view to his assignment to another Department, it would be necessary that the heads of the two Departments should concur in an application to the Treasury to this end, that no such case of transfer on promotion has ever arisen, that no provision has been made in the reorganisation of the Exchequer and Audit Department for the promotion of deserving abstractors according to their conditions of service, that many of these abstractors in the Exchequer and Audit Department are now doing work which was but recently 1812 done by Second Division clerks, that they are now in receipt of only 25s. a week, or less salary than that given to nominated messengers in this Department, while three clerks of only five or six years service are in receipt of nearly £400 per annum each, he will explain whether the Comptrollor and Auditor-General, in introducing these abstractors into his Department, never contemplated the promotion of any of them, no matter what merit may be shown by them; and, if so, whether he proposes to take any steps in the matter.
(Answered by Mr. Runciman.) As I have already informed the bon. Member, none of the abstractors in question have completed the minimum service requisite before their claims to promotion can be considered.
§ MR. FIELDTo ask the Secretary to the Treasury whether he is aware that there are three clerks in the Exchequer and Audit Department, two of whom entered the service in October, 1902, and the third in October, 1900, in receipt of £365 per annum each; that the highest salary received by any other clerk in the Department with the same length of service is £100 per annum; that each of these three clerks, on the recent reorganisation of the Department on 1st November, 1905, received an addition to their salaries of £155, £155, and £125, respectively; and, seeing that all the Second Division clerks in the Department with eight years service and upwards were promoted to the Higher Division and were not granted any immediate increase of salary, will he say why these three clerks with such short service, who are now senior and superior to 140 men, about three-fourths of the whole staff', who entered the Department before them and many of whom have six or seven times their service, were not placed on the seniority list according to their annual rates of pay intead of having their salaries nearly doubled.
(Answered by Mr. Runciman.) No change has been made in the relative seniority of the three officers referred to, who, previous to the reorganisation of 1st November, 1905, were clerks of the First Division and members of the directing staff, and, as such, senior to the whole of the Second Division establishment. Being 1813 thus already in a senior position in the office they naturally had priority in selection to fill vacancies in the newly-constituted grade of chief examiners on a scale of pay £350–£15–£500. The Second Division clerks who were similarly selected received the same scale of pay.