§ Mr. SNOWDENasked the Secretary to the Treasury if a reply has been sent My the Treasury to the memorial of the assistant clerks (new class) asking for increase of salaries, and if such reply is a refusal to grant any advance on the ground that the present scale of pay is fully adequate; if so, is this to be taken that the Treasury have decided upon a scale of salary by which a man receives a guinea a week at twenty-one and £100 a year at twenty-eight as adequate pay for Civil Service clerks, most, of whom have passed two competitive examinations; and will the Treasury reconsider the question with a view of putting these men on a rate of pay a little nearer the ordinary commercial rate for similar work?
§ Mr. HOBHOUSEThe answer to the first two parts of the question is in the affirmative. Assistant clerks are normally recruited from an examination for which only boy clerks or boy copyists are eligible. Their scale of salary was considerably improved in 1909, and rises to £150, or, in special cases, to £170 a year, together with pension rights, which remuneration seems adequate for the work performed.