---

Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I was going to deal with that later, but I shall do so now. There are two elements that we need to disentangle. One of them is the extent to which, for a variety of reasons, we have fallen behind comparators in earnings, and therefore the extent to which there needs to be catch-up in order to establish the proper base. The second element is how we decide what the increase will be year on year in the future—what mechanism might we put in place to prevent this matter from having to come back before the House. I urge that they are treated as two separate issues. We do not need to say, ““This is the comparator we are dealing with to look at what should be the base figure””, and to be for ever tied to that particular group. It might be the case that we are tied to that group, but we might instead look at a basket of groups and at an average increase. The two issues are not integrally linked, and it would be a mistake to link them as we would then be back in the situation of having reports and analysis, all of which become arguable, debatable and, ultimately, votable. Let me return to the issue I was addressing. The PWC report states boldly that the evaluation results do not take account of the extensive working hours of a Member of Parliament. It says that it assumes that we work a normal professional working week. I remember a good colleague of mine who was an Australian Senator and who then entered the private sector saying to me, ““The big difference between full-time in this game and in the private sector is weekends.”” I think all Members will understand that comment. I do not say that we work every hour of every day of the week, but there are always pressures on us to do so. That is underestimated and misunderstood.