§ Mr. Gristasked the Lord President of the Council if, following his announcement on 30th July on the dispersal of Government jobs, he will indicate the number of posts to be filled by local recruitment in the Cardiff area.
§ Mr. Robert SheldonI have been asked to reply.
The dispersal decisions announced yesterday by my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council included 358W the move of some 7,400 Civil Service posts to Cardiff and Newport. It is not possible at this stage to say precisely how many of these posts will be filled by local recruitment, but as a rough estimate we expect that initially about half the posts will be filled in this way. In the case of the move of parts of the Companies Registration Office, however, the proportion of local recruitment posts will be substanially higher.
In the longer term we would expect an ever increasing proportion of the posts to be filled by local recruitment.