An interchange in court on Monday has much wider sigi.Ificance
than may seem. Mr. Justice Hilbery, sitting in the King's Bench Division, elicited from a witness that he had been employed by a Regional Petroleum Office as a Grade 3 clerk at £5 a week to deal with applications for supplementary petrol coupons. Very few such applications, it was stated in reply to another question by the Judge, went up to the control officer. In other words, applications which may vitally affect the daily work of a doctor, a clergyman, a bus:ness man or many others, are decided for good or ill by a £5 a week clerk. It helps very little to say that there are general_ rules which the staff must follow. In at least half the cases of application for supplementary petrol special, not general, considerations are put forward ; whoever decides on them, it ought to be someone substantially higher than Grade 3. And this, of course, is happen- ing in every Government office. It means that in one way or other tens or hundreds of thousands of businesses are at the mercy of minor civil service clerks. It may be that as things are, since con- trols must be, the volume of work is such that minor civil service clerks must be employed on it. There is, of course, no ground for criticising the clerks themselves. It is the system that needs criticism —and needs altering at the earliest moment possible.
* * * *
Previous page
