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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I do not think that the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) is right. The reason that a whopping great increase, as he put it, is recommended every so often is that increases have been suppressed by the Government for the previous four or five years. That is what has happened on every occasion. If we had a mechanism, for example, for implementing whatever increase had been applied every year to public sector salaries—2 or 3 per cent., or whatever—this issue would never arise. We would never have a really bad increase, and we would never have a really big one. I think that we, and the public, would be satisfied with that.