---

Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

My hon. Friend is quite wrong. That increase reflected several years during which, for a number of reasons—it was often because of the pay policies, under all Governments—we had fallen seriously behind comparable public and private sector jobs in the outside world. He is right to say that those large leaps do not favour us—as has been said, moving in line with the other indices would be a much better way of handling things—so we possibly come to the same conclusion, but we do not necessarily have the same view of the history. What do we need to do to resolve the situation so that we do not have to discuss this issue in the future? We have talked about the question of catching up. We need an index by which pay will be automatically uprated without a confirmatory vote. We must be clear that this is not about a review body examining various indices and coming up with recommendations. The situation should be—I think that there will be broad support in the House for this—that on, or shortly after, 1 April each year the Department of Resources, the old Department of Finance and Administration, would contact the Office for National Statistics or whatever the appropriate body to say that we are linked to such an indicator and detail the increase in the past year, and there would then be an automatic uprating. I do not care what the indicator is. It could be the retail prices index, the average earnings index, the public sector average earnings index or even the Chicago grain index. In a sense, that is less relevant than the fact that it needs to be something that the public understand and that is therefore clearly in the public domain and is not influenced by our particular actions. The public sector average earnings index might be the better one to use to try to provide a greater and clearer linkage. I am not keen on a link to just one small part of the civil service, because organisational and structural changes could take place, which would then have a significant effect on us. There is one possible attraction of being linked to the senior civil service, because in my experience, senior civil servants always seem to have done well in finding ways through the pay policies of both Governments. However, in general, we would be better considering a basket of agreements and taking the median or another average. I believe that that is the offer that has been made to the police. I hope that Sir John Baker will take that on board. I also hope that when we come back to the matter before the summer recess, we ensure that that is clearly understood.