§ Mr. WILLIAM RUTHERFORD (Liverpool, West Derby)I beg to ask the Postmaster-General, in view of his having accepted the recommendations of the Hobhouse Committee, whether this now involves a scale of wages for large provincial towns commencing at 18s. per week at eighteen years of age, and proceeding by yearly increments to £2 16s. per week; whether he is aware that a clerk named Webster, at Hull, twenty-nine years of age, was on the 31st December last in receipt of £1 3s. 6d. per week, as against the scale of wages giving £2 Is. 6d. per week for telegraphists at Hull at twenty-nine years of age; and whether it is his intention to raise Webster's salary to that amount.
§ THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL (Mr. SYDNEY BUXTON,) Tower Hamlets,882 Poplar Hull is in Class I. and the scale of wages for an officer entering at eighteen years of age would therefore be 18s. Officers entering the class at a higher age than twenty-one receive "age pay" at twenty-one (24s.) and thence proceed by the scale recommended by the Committee (Paragraph 261) to the maximum. There is no age pay for an officer of twenty-nine years of age. The officer to whom reference is made was nearly twenty-seven years of age when appointed to the class. His pay will be at once adjusted in accordance with the recommendations of the Committee.