Services of the Commonwealth

A service is a permanent corps of public officers in the Commonwealth, whose members hold a common warrant and are held to common standards. The senior posts of the ministries, parliaments, bureaus and other organisations are mostly filled from them, and so are those of the republic governments. Officers are posted from one institution to another over a career, and remain members of their service throughout.

Services and Organisations #

The difference between a service and an organisation comes from Commonwealth personalism, in which a role belongs to the person and not the post. Members of a service hold a personal warrant, like a commission, an attestation or a pass in its examination, and their grade goes with them from post to post. An organisation is made up of posts, premises and work, and people hold its posts by appointment.

A few bodies are both. Police commissions travel with the constable, and soldiers can hold one as well as their attestation, so the Commonwealth Police Service counts as a service with a college and circuits of its own. The Commonwealth Armed Forces are one too, and a Commander moved from an Army company to a police division is still a Commander. The Territorial Service, the Commonwealth Levy and the Common Navy are organisations to which members of the Armed Forces are posted. The Commonwealth Prosecution Service and the Commonwealth Corrections Service are also organisations, despite their names, since they confer no warrant of their own. Prosecutors are officers of the Commonwealth Legal Service, and prison officers are constables of the Police Service holding the Custodial endorsement.

Most civil servants do not belong to a service. These uncadred civil servants are clerks, technicians, linesmen, registry staff and harbour staff employed directly by a bureau, and usually spend their working lives in it. An uncadred civil servant may sit the examination for a service at any point in their career, and a large part of each intake is recruited this way.

Cadres #

A cadre is the list of posts belonging to a service under one authority, and the officers allotted to fill them. Each service keeps one or more cadres under a cadre authority, usually the ministry or parliament that constituted it, which recruits, trains, allots, promotes and disciplines its officers. Appointment to a particular post is made by the body receiving the officer, which chooses from the cadre, and a republic or bureau can turn down an officer it does not want.

Officers move within their cadre by posting, and to a post outside it by deputation, as when a State Service diplomat is deputed to the Bureau of Trade for a round of trade negotiations. A secondment to an interwork detachment is total, and the officer holds no other duties for the life of the detachment. Each service recruits at a single grade. Seniority is counted from the year of allotment, called the intake, and promotion is decided by board.

Mandatory and Statutory Services #

The mandatory services are common to the federal government and the republics, and are constituted by mandate of the Mandatory Ecclesia. There are four: the Commonwealth Administrative Service, the Commonwealth Armed Forces, the Commonwealth Police Service and the Commonwealth Judicial Service. Their members are allotted to republic cadres, or in the Armed Forces raised by republic Components, and much of their service is in or for the republics.

The statutory services are constituted by the statute of a single ministry or parliament, and serve only that body, its bureaus and its constituent organisations. There are fifteen. A service whose work belongs to two bodies at once is constituted instead under the standing Common Services commission of the State Secretaries.

Interwork Detachments hold no cadre. They are staffed by officers seconded from the services and by uncadred staff lent by the bureaus that formed them, and both return when the detachment dissolves. A detachment whose work proves permanent may be given a statute as a new service, as the Economic and Statistical Service was in 1998.