Catalogue description Records of the Paymaster General's Office and predecessors

Before 1835 there were four separate departments dealing with the pay and related matters of the armed services: the Paymaster General of the Forces, the Paymaster and Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital, the Treasurer of Ordnance, and the Treasurer of the Navy. These four offices were consolidated in 1835 in the office of Paymaster General.

The Paymaster General of the guards and garrisons shared his duties with a Paymaster General of the Forces abroad for a period after 1703, but became sole Paymaster General of the guards and garrisons and land forces after the accession of George I, and by 1743 had become known as Paymaster General of the Forces. He almost invariably held in addition the office of Paymaster and Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital.

The Civil Service was originally paid partly by fees and partly from the Civil List. On the accession of William IV in 1830, however, in return for the surrender of the hereditary revenues of the Crown, responsibility for the payment of all civil service salaries and allowances was transferred from the Civil List to the Exchequer. When the Exchequer was reformed in 1834, the tally system was abolished and a single public account at the Bank of England substituted and the old Exchequer offices were abolished and replaced by two new ones: the Comptroller General of the Exchequer and the Paymaster of the Civil Service. The latter office was absorbed in that of the Paymaster General in 1848. In 1861 the office of Paymaster of Civil Services in Ireland was also merged in the Paymaster General's Office.

The Paymaster General's duties, originally confined to the pay, etc, of the armed services, were extended in 1848 when he absorbed the offices of Paymaster of Exchequer Bills and Paymaster of the Civil Service. He thus became the principal paying agent of the government and the banker for all government departments except the revenue departments and the National Debt Office. In 1872 he took over the duties formerly exercised by the Accountant General of the Court of Chancery. In 1926 this work passed to the Accountant General of the Supreme Court under the Administration of Justice Act 1925.

The Paymaster General makes payments on behalf of departments in respect of such items as salaries, contractors' accounts, subsidies, compensation and payments relating to social and other services. He is also responsible for the payment of retired pay and pensions to officers of the Armed and Civil Services and their widows and dependants, to teachers and to members of the Royal Irish Constabulary; and for the payment of Health Service pensions and pensions borne on the Consolidated Fund.

The Paymaster General is usually a minister without portfolio available for any duties which the government of the day may entrust to him. The post may be combined with another office, or may be left unfilled. It is sometimes occupied by a peer whose main function is to act for several departments in the House of Lords. He is not the effective head of the Paymaster General's Office, which is under a permanent Assistant Paymaster General, to whom nearly all the formal functions of the Paymaster General are delegated, and who regards the Chancellor of the Exchequer as his political chief.