18 April, 1923.]

has been payable on the £1,500 part of it? No, the amount provided in the Estimates for 1922-23, namely £1,500, was the civil salary. The post is not necessarily a Naval Officer's post; it is sometimes filled by a civilian and sometimes by a Naval Officer; it is filled by the best man available. The £1,500 would have a bonus added on to it on the ordinary Civil Service scale. The £2,100 is the pay of a Rear-Admiral serving at the Admiralty, and, of course, it has no bonus in addition.

1460. Presumably the Director of Dockyards is the man to whom the various Admiral Superintendents are responsible. -He is responsible for the general organisation of work at the dockyards.

1461. An Admiral Superintendent of a dockyard draws a salary of about £3.000 per annum?-It is rather less than that -about £2,700-but of course he has necessary expenses, owing to his position at the dockyard, which the Director at the Admiralty does not have. that you are speaking of includes his table money for entertaining at the dockyard.

The pay

1462. But the salary of the Director does not include a residence and a number of other things?—No. The emoluments of an Admiral Superintendent are high, but it is because of the extra expenses incurred in holding such a position. He has to live in a big house in the dockyard and keep it up.

1463. But is not this one anomaly among all the others. The man who is right at the very top is generally in receipt of a higher emolument, the argument being that he must have some prestige to enable him to impose his will on the subordinates, and that prestige has to be marked by a money payment. Here we have a man who can direct all the dockyards for a salary of £2,100 per annum, whereas the Superintendent of a dockyard gets nearly £3,000?-As I have tried to explain, the pay of the two appointments is not really very different. The pay of the Director of Dockyards as a Rear-Admiral is based on the Naval pay of a Rear-Admiral, and so is the pay of the Admiral Superintendent, but the Admiral Superintendent has various allowances in the way of table money, servants, and so on, because of necessary expenses of the post in which he occupies.

the

[Continued.

1465. Would he regard this salary of £2,100 a year as a higher emolument than the £2,800 that he would get in his previous post ?-It is much more lucrative to him than being at Malta on nominally higher emoluments.

1466. Is not it the fact that the advantage of living in London as compared with living in Malta make him prepared to lose money.-No; you would find any Admiral Superintendent, not only at Malta, but at Portsmouth, or Devonport, would gladly come to the Admiralty as Director of Dockyards.

Mr. Harmsworth.

1467. Page 4 of the typewritten statement which has been put in deals with the Secretary's Department. There was in 1914/15 one Assistant Secretary at £1,400 a year, and I see he has got promotion and is now called a Deputy Secretary in receipt of £2,200 a year. Is that just because of the change of name, and is it the same person?-The reasons are twofold: One is that the salaries of permanent Secretaries of the principal Departments were, as I think has been mentioned, more than once in the House, raised in consequence of the recommendation of the Asquith Committee. It was part of the recommendation of that Committee that the salaries of certain other officials coming next in the hierarchy should be considered also, although they did not actually name an increase. Apart from that, the duties of the Secretary and his immediate staff officers have been entirely altered since 1914 at the Admiralty by the Cabinet decision that he shall be the principal financial officer of the Admiralty as well as the principal administrative officer. My predecessor had practically nothing to do with Navy finance. He was the principal administrative officer under the Board. 50 or 60 per cent. of my time is occupied with

finance.

1468. Then who undertook the finance before that?-The Accountant General

18 April, 1923.]

was Accounting Officer and there was an Assistant Secretary for Finance under the Permanent Secretary, but it was the opinion of the Cabinet, having had the matter enquired into by a Committee, that the arrangements in the Fighting Departments did not give sufficient assurance that all matters that were discussed were considered adequately on the financial side, and it was their intention by this arrangement to increase very largely the financial supervision in the Departments. I think there is no doubt, judging from our experience in the Admiralty, that that has been the result of the change.

1469. I notice also that whereas there was one Assistant Secretary in 1914/15 there are now two Principal Assistant Secretaries, and where there were six Principal Clerks and nine Assistant Principal Clerks and 17 clerks, the salaries of the whole of them have gone up and they have gone up in number. Of course that is much the same question as has been put throughout the whole of the Estimates-they have gone up in personnel and in pay. Is there any reason for this Department being so increased because of there being many more important duties? -What I have said applies to the officers under the Secretary down to the Assistant Secretaries. All those officers have responsibilities in finance which they had not before the war. Apart from that, we have had to increase the number of the main branches of the Secretary's Department by two. One of those is in consequence of the very great difficulty and importance now of labour questions.

We

have had to form a Labour Branch to deal with labour questions affecting the wages staff under the Admiralty as a whole. We found it was no longer possible to leave the Director of Dockyards to deal with labour questions affecting the dockyard, and to the Director of Victualling those affecting the Victualling Yards, and so on. We have had to concentrate that work in a new branch. In addition, since the war, staff questions have been very numerous and troublesome. The mere work of getting down the staff of the Admiralty from what it had arrived at during the war, when it was somewhere about 4,000, to what it is now, has meant an immense amount of work. The decisions whether new Departments

should remain, and what the staff of them should be, and so on, have had to

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[Continued.

be dealt with. Then there has been the complication due to the "ex-Service man" policy of the Government. We have had to make places in the Departments for a certain proportion of exService men, and that has meant a very great deal of detail work.

1470. Has it meant replacing others?Yes, and that has been the whole trouble of it. As we decrease our staff we are not allowed to send away competent ex-Service men and keep competent non-ex-Service men. We have to be watching the whole staff all the time and moving these ex-Service men round the Departments.

Chairman.

1471. In order to try and get them into a suitable place?-To keep them in place while we discharge the non-Service staff. Everything of that sort, as I think you will see, has made our work of dealing with staffs very complicated. For the time being therefore we have had to double-bank our Establishment Branch, but that is purely temporary, and we expect after another 12 months to do away with that double-banking. That will result in decreasing our number of Assistant Secretaries, and so on.

Mr. Harmsworth.

1472. Then we may look for a big reduction at the end of another 12 months?-You will see a reduction.

1473. But that is only in this section of the Department?-That is in the Secretary's Department. As compared with last year we have been able in this Department to make a reduction of 43 on a staff of 181, which shows that the reduction of staff is very carefully looked at.

1474. But generally undoubtedly the staff throughout the whole of the Admiralty itself has been increased ?— Yes.

1475. Permanently as a whole there will be a slight increase?-There will be an increase on pre-war.

1476. Am I to take it that the work at the Admiralty as a whole will be more competently done with this increase now and in the future than it was done before the war?-Certainly.

Chairman.

1477. The witness has already stated that the reason why there must be an

E

18 April, 1923.]

increase is owing to the number of new services brought into being on account of the war, and he instanced paravanes and various other things. I understood from Sir Charles Walker that eventually there will be an increase, but with regard to the comparable services at the present day and before the war the numbers will be the same? No, I do not think I should like to say that, because the suggestion which the Honourable Member made just now is very true, that before the war the staff of the Admiralty as a whole in 1914 was not adequate for its duties in many directions. As evidence of that if you look at the 1914 Estimates, apart from the numbers employed, you will see the Estimates for the various Departments included a lump sum for additional staff to be decided upon during the year. The Admiralty in fact had not been keeping pace for some years with the increased expansion of the Navy and the increased complication of its equipment, and we were very seriously overworked and undergraded then. We do hope, that when we have made all the reductions that the work admits of, we shall be allowed to keep a staff adequate for the work.

Mr. Harmsworth.

1478. Would not it be possible to do away with a certain portion of the staff that exists now, and to keep more of a skeleton organisation in running the Admiralty? Then if there is a war in the future at any time you could take on the extra staff that is at present employed. in order to increase the activities of the various Departments. Could not you keep some of these sections of the Departments in a more or less skeleton form until that war comes, instead of building them up at the present time, as seems to be the policy? I think that is a policy we are following in all the Departments that admit of it. For instance, such a Department as the Signal Department is a mere skeleton of what it would have to be in war time. The same applies to the different sections of the Naval staff; they are really on a skeleton basis.

1479. That is in the Admiralty itself? --Yes.

Major Sir Archibald Sinclair.

1480. On page 3 of the typewritten statement I see the First Sea Lord with:

[Continued.

his furnished house gets £3,000 a year. which is a good deal more than the pay of an Admiral of the Fleet?-He gets £3,000 a year plus his half-pay as Admiral of the Fleet.

1481. So he gets a good deal more than an Admiral who is doing his ordinary duties? He does not get quite as much as a Commander-in-Chief. A Commanderin-Chief, of course, gets table money, and so on, and has a great many expenses that the First Sea Lord need not necessarily have.

1482. So he gets less by coming to the Admiralty? Yes.

Mr. Harmsworth.

1483. The £3,000 a year which the First Sea Lord gets is merely his Admiral's pay, is it not?-No; it is in addition to his naval half-pay. He gets £1,800 a year in addition, so he gets in all £4,800.

Major Sir Archibald Sinclair.

1484. What does a Commander-in-Chief get? (Sir Charles Walker): Over £4,000 if you include table money.

1485. He would not come up to £4,800 then ?-No, but he is a good deal out of pocket by it. The Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth is out of pocket, certainly. He will probably spend £1,000 a year in addition to his pay. In London the First Sea Lord need not do that.

1486. The First Sea Lord in London gets more than the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth? No, the Commander-inChief at Portsmouth gets more.

1487. But you said he only gets £4,100 a year, whereas the First Sea Lord in London gets £4,800?-I will work it out; it comprises a lot of things.

Sir Philip Pilditch.

1488. Dealing with the general abstract of Vote 12, that shows an increase of general expenditure from £457,000 in 1914-15 to roughly £1,134,000 now-that is very nearly three-fold. I have taken a note of what you have just said about the decrease you hope to make, but could you help the Committee by telling us in general terms how much of that increase of about £700,000 is due to increase of emoluments, how must is due to increase of numbers, and how much is due to new or increased services? In other words,

18 April, 1923.]

could you digest this increase of threefold into any simple form for us?-(Sir Oswyn Murray): Yes, I think I could, but I could not do it offhand.

1489. Would you mind producing it next week?-Yes. You want to know the increase of emoluments and the increase of personnel?

1490. And anything in regard to new or altered services?-Yes, with the war services that are dying out.

1491. Could you give us the same for the year 1914-15?—Yes.

1492. This year there has been practically no change from last year, except a mere trifling reduction?-It is £130,000.

1493. No, I only make it £40,000?That is only on the salaried staff.

1494. I am taking your abstract and asking you about that? Yes, but you inust remember that is a comparison of the salaried staff of separate Departinents If you want to take what we are spending on Admiralty staff this year you must take sections A and B, and similarly in the case of last year.

1495. I thought when I was looking at the summary perhaps it would be simpler for you to take one figure, but if you prefer to give it over the whole of the figures quoted on page 154 of the Estimates that would be better? I will take A and B together, because that is the staff of the Department.

1496. Will you look at Vote 12C on pages 30 and 31 of your typewritten statement where the totals are given. The numbers have risen apparently of the office keepers, hall porters, messengers, and the like from 335 to 523 last year, and 461 estimated in the coming year. Without going into the question of the increase of the cost I should like to know from you, either now or next week, what real justification there can be for such an enormous increase in this class of servants, unless you have enormously increased your office accommodation?We have increased and enormously scattered our office accommodation. We are scattered in different buildings all about London now instead of being oncentrated in the Admiralty. That, of course, from the point of view of messenger service, is very expensive.

1497. Do you think there would be any possible saving effected by a greater concentration, and is that greater concentration possible or likely?-It would be a

41314

[Continued.

very great saving if we could concentrate, but there seems no possibility at present of the Treasury providing the funds to give us additional buildings close to Whitehall.

1498. Much of this accommodation is temporary on short leases, or something of that sort, I suppose?-That is so.

1499. Is it by way of keeping it in a skeleton form that it has been done in that way, or is it simply because you could not get the Government to provide the money?-It is simply because the Office of Works has gone all over London to find the cheapest accommodation that is suitable. To provide anything close to us at Whitehall they would either have to take the County Council building which is just being vacated, but which I believe is a very expensive building, or they would have to build.

1500 Then this enormous increase in the supernumerary staff arises from the enormous increase of the ordinary staff of the higher grades and others?-And it is owing to the scattered nature of the accommodation. The increase you

have referred to is 126.

1501. Having regard to the very large figures which this sort of thing involves, perhaps you could give us something a little more specific about it next week?-Yes.

Chairman.

1502. Is every room used at the Admiralty now?—Yes.

1503. Including the new rooms which were built on the top floor?-Including those temporary buildings on the roof, which unfortunately are now considered so dangerous from fear of fire that we are told we must get out of them.

Major Sir Archibald Sinclair.

1504. Is Sir Charles Walker now prepared to give an answer to my question with regard to the Commander-in-Chief's salary? Sir Charles Walker): The Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth gets at present about £4,950 a year against the £4,800 of the First Sea Lord, but onethird of that, namely, his table money, is free of income tax, which, of course, means, if you add income tax his gross salary would be considerably over £5,000 a year at Portsmouth.

1505. Then there is a difference of £200 or £300? More than that. It is free of E 2

18 April, 1923.]

tax altogether to the extent of £1,640. Paying super-tax at something like 4s. in the pound would be rather heavy. That money is for entertaining, and the amount of entertaining the Commandersin-Chief at the three ports have to do is particularly heavy.

Sir Philip Pilditch.

1506. If we are going to deal with Votes 13, 14 and 15 next week, can we have the details of them on these large sheets early, because it is utterly impossible for us to consider these in advance, for the reason that in the printed Estimates you do not give the 1914-15 expenditure?-Votes 13,

[Continued

14 and 15 are non-effective Votes, and no question of salaries arises at all, and we could not give you any tables. As a matter of fact, it is really money Over which the Admiralty has no control; it is nearly all for pensions to widows, and

so on.

1507. Still, one would like to know on the matter of pensions what they were in 1914-15, because they are part of the emoluments? Yes, I can get out for you a comparison of the Votes quite easily.

Chairman.

1508. It will be a help if you will do so? -Yes.

Chairman.

509. You were going to put in a memorandum about the sale of ships for breaking up?-(Sir Charles Walker): Yes, the memorandum has been handed in (see Appendix).

1510. You were also to give the Committee some information on the question of percentage paid to banks? Yes. First

may I deal with the question which was asked on the Vote for Lighthouses and the increase of £1,000 over the estimate of last year? The estimate of last year, which was prepared by Trinity House, omitted to allow for bonus, and it was, therefore, an under-estimate. We had to add £1,700 to the estimate in order to provide for the bonus, but we reduced that excess by savings in other directions