Mr. Pat Burke:

The first thing to say is that we would all like a situation in which people are very flexible in the type of additional work they will take on, but in the best of all worlds there are limitations on that and ultimately there are legitimate limitations. I was using the example of a general operative. Let us say we have thousands of those and we want one of them, or a number of them, to do kango hammer duties or something that is significant, additional and onerous, for which we acknowledge additional recompense is required or is justified. Let us take it we have made those leaps and concluded that this warrants more. My thesis is that to consider upgrading the pay of all general operatives so that anyone we ask to do this would now have to do it would be folly. We do not want to do that. It would be very costly - needlessly costly. That is one route. We rule that out. The second possible route is to create a new grade of general operative kango hammer. We do not want to do that either because there would genuinely be a lot of public criticism and we would be having another session of this kind in ten years' time in which the Deputy would be asking us how come we have 10,000 grades in the public service - and he would be right. So that would be very foolish. I am working on the premise that the payment is actually merited based on additionality and so on. The third approach is to pay something called an allowance. "Allowance" is not a great word now, and maybe it needs to be called something else. Maybe it is a supplementary pay scale, or whatever. In policy terms and - to use a phrase that was mentioned earlier - in common sense terms it can often be the best way of doing things.