The Commission on the Public Services of the Governments in the Federation of Nigeria was constituted in 1954 by the Council of Ministers under the new Lyttleton Constitution, and reported in 1955. It was chaired by Sir Edgar Parry Bridges (after whom it is informally known as the Bridges Commission), and followed the earlier Foot Commission (1948) and Phillipson–Adebo Report (1953) on the Nigerianisation of the civil service.
The Commission's mandate was to determine: (i) the proper organisation of the federal and regional public services under the new constitution; (ii) the conditions of service for expatriate (overwhelmingly British) and Nigerian officers; and (iii) the pace at which Nigerian officers should be promoted into the "super-scale" senior positions then dominated by Colonial Service personnel. It received memoranda from the Federal Public Service Commission, the three Regional governments, the Nigerian Union of Civil Servants, and individual officers.
The report recommended a graduated Nigerianisation: priority for Nigerian appointment to all vacancies for which a qualified Nigerian was available, generous "compensation for loss of career" terms (the Lump Sum Compensation Scheme) to encourage expatriate retirement, and a substantial overseas-training programme. It also entrenched separate federal and regional public service commissions — a structure carried forward into the 1960 Independence Constitution and ultimately Chapter VI of the 1999 Constitution. Implementation was uneven: at independence in 1960, expatriates still held a majority of super-scale posts, and full Nigerianisation of the federal civil service was not achieved until the early 1970s. The Bridges scheme nevertheless established the legal and financial template for the orderly handover of the colonial administration.