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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

We might find this debate a bit embarrassing, but it is one that we properly need to have. It is good that it has been entered into in a spirit of openness and engagement, among the different points of view throughout the House. This will of course not be the last such debate, by definition. There will be at least one more debate when the Government's review commission comes back, and that review will not deal with staffing and office issues, which we will come back too. To think that the issue will fall off the agenda is therefore wrong. None the less, it is important now to give a steer in the right direction. I have never had a big problem with the principle that public sector workers—I have always considered myself to be a public sector worker in this job, paid by the public to do a job for the public—could and should have their wages or salaries assessed and decided by an independent process. However, if one takes that view—I am very comfortable about that—it should be a consistent view across the public sector, not a ““take it here and leave it there”” view. That is why, when we have referred Members' pay to the Senior Salaries Review Body in the past, I have always taken the view that we should automatically adopt what it recommends. That is why the question to the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House about whether Governments in future will adopt what is recommended—to which I shall return—is so important. Colleagues and I have not only taken the view that I have set out, but have in recent months taken the view that when an independent body said that nurses in England should be paid without staging, that should have happened. They are public sector workers of great importance and should not have received a staged pay increase when the recommendation was that the increase should be paid all in one go. Likewise, we took the similarly clear view that when police pay negotiations went to arbitration and were decided, the arbitrated amount should have been implemented. That is a consistent view, and I am sad that the Government have been inconsistent. Of course I understand the constraints of keeping inflation down and ensuring that the economy does not get out of control; but that will not be significantly impaired if we have mechanisms to take it into account, so that we can come back and recommend certain increases, whether for nurses, the police or Members of Parliament. I would have been happy had the Government said, ““Here's the SSRB—we're just putting it on the table and asking you to vote on it.”” That would have been a perfectly satisfactory outcome.