[continued]

PEACETIME ACTION

5. Action in non-crisis peacetime will be restricted to the following measures:

a. The CSD will continue to be responsible for the nomination of Principal and Deputy Principal Officers for each of the 10 Home Defence Regions;

b. The CSD will also nominate Principal and Deputy Principal Officers for each of the 17 Home Defence Sub-regions. (We have already approached the departments concerned about these appointments, in a letter of 22 March 1978.)

c. Departments will continue to provide departmental and specialist staff to fill appropriate functional posts in the RHQs and SRHQs for which particular experience or qualifications are required. Departments may adopt, at their discretion, either of the following courses of action, or a combination of both, to fill these posts, depending on how far it is necessary to brief staff on their wartime duties or for them to carry out preparatory work in peace-time:

i. Nominate, notify and brief only the senior staff, while at the same time earmarking other key personnel but not informing or briefing them; or

ii. Nominate, notify and brief all key personnel.

d. Departments will continue to be responsible for selecting all common service staff – administrative, secretarial, clerical and industrial – below Deputy Principal Officer, for the individual RHQs and SRHQs when called upon to do so. This time, however, in order to overcome the difficulties experienced in the 1971 exercise, we have assigned quotas of staff for each RHQ and SRHQ which individual departments will be expected to provide, basing our calculations on staff numbers in the areas concerned. Of necessity, we have leaned heavily on those departments with large regional staffs.

6. We asked departments in my DEO letter of 20 August 1969 to find volunteers willing to train for communications duties, and in March 1972 the Home Office initiated arrangements with certain departments for the release of individuals for training. We wish to continue this arrangement and in assigning quotas under paragraph 5d above we have tried to take account of the volunteers departments were asked to provide. Fpr ease of reference the arrangements for these volunteers are reproduced at ANNEX B. These volunteers apart, the staff selected to meet the assigned quotas should not be notified of their selection for wartime duties until transition to war arrangements are initiated (see Annex A).

7. The Welsh Office will be responsible for arrangements for providing general staff for wartime duties in Wales. Separate arrangements will continue to apply in Scotland.

8. Annexes C and D show the total complements of all categories of staff for RHQs and SRHQs respectively, and Annex E is a list of the locations. The deployment of RHQ staff is explained in paragraph 2 of Annex A.

TYPE OF STAFF REQUIRED

9. In general, staff should be found from within the region to which they have been allocated, and ideally within the sub-region. They should be of good calibre and have a good health record. They should not be liable for recall in an emergency to the Armed Forces or other Services, including the Merchant Navy. Preferably, they should have no abnormal domestic ties and be some years from retirement. Specialist