16

H.—34.

mental heads make these recommendations without consulting the responsible officers under them. The requirements of finance often make it necessary for Ministers or Cabinet to cut down these recommendations, and if any one is put down by his departmental head for a special increase on account of his ability, these special increases are often the first to be reduced to bring the total within the limit of available finance, and the result is that the good, bad, and indifferent officers in any particular Department get advances at much the same rate. There are considerable differences in pay, however, between different Departments. One Department may be under a generous head or a generous Minister, who looks at the increases from the point of view of the staff; another Department may be under an economical head or an economical Minister, who looks at it from the point of view of the taxpayer, and the result is that the officers of the latter Department will not get as large increases as those of the former, and this, continued year after year for several years, will make a considerable difference between the pay of officers in one Department and those doing similar work in another. These anomalies create a considerable amount of dissatisfaction. Merit does not count as it should. The passing of the Senior Civil Service Examination is necessary for those who have come in as cadets if they wish to get more than £200 a year, but, except for this, the passing of examinations, either departmental or outside examinations, such as Solicitors' and Accountancy Examinations, do not carry weight and bring the promotion that might reasonably be expected. The result is that many of the more able young fellows, finding their advancement slow, get out of the Service at the first opportunity, and it is quite a common occurrence to find young men in the Service studying for law, accountancy, or other examinations, not with the object of getting on in the Service, but with the object of obtaining degrees that will enable them to get out of it. Salaries. As already indicated, there is no uniformity in the salaries paid throughout the Service for similar classes of work, and this want of uniformity causes considerable dissatisfaction amongst the officers of the staff, for, after all, salary is in most cases largely a matter of comparison, and if one man sees others doing work of a similar nature to, and in many cases of much less responsible character than, the work that he is doing, and receiving more pay than he is getting, he naturally becomes dissatisfied. Going through the Service, it is found in many cases that the salary paid has no relationship to the work being done. When increases in pay are going, they are usually doled out at so-much a head all round, but when the heads of Departments allot the work to be done in the lower grades of the Service it is generally given to those who have the capacity to do it, regardless of the pay received; and it is often found that a man receiving a small salary is doing work of a responsible nature, and others in the same Department receiving a much higher salary are doing an inferior class of work. The higher salary is the result of long service and not merit. The man doing the responsible work at a low salary is doing it because he has the ability to do it, and he is getting the lower salary on account of short service. This is the cause of much dissatisfaction. We could hardly say that the salaries as a whole are either too high or too low, but they badly need adjusting; and the men should be paid for the work they do, and not for the time they have been in the service. During the last few years many of the Departments have been finding a difficulty in obtaining the necessary number of cadets, and it seems necessary that an increase in the salaries payable to those entering the Service should be made. At the same time lads, in taking up a career, are not guided so much by the salaries paid at the outset as by the prospects of the career itself, and if merit were more recognized, promotions kept entirely for those within the Service, and the ultimate prizes of the Services increased, young fellows of ability would join the Service and remain in it much more readily than they do now.