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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

When I first came to the House in 1983 there were stories about some of our illustrious predecessors, from both sides of the House, who did not believe in holding surgeries. There is a wonderful story—perhaps it is apocryphal—about a Member who would telephone his constituency association and say, ““I shall be making my annual visit to the constituency in March. Please lay on the cocktail party.”” Those days died out 20 or 30 years ago, and rightly so. The service that we are now expected to give is heavy. There is no shortage of people who are willing to become MPs and take on a work load of 60, 70 or 80 hours a week, but I believe that the pay should reflect that burden. In the second section of the report, the SSRB and PricewaterhouseCoopers set out some comparators. On page 17, the total package for MPs—our total reward, including pensions—is compared to that of a head teacher, a police superintendent, a senior civil servant at grade 1, a county council second-tier executive, an armed forces colonel and a director of a health trust. Our salary comes out as 90 per cent. of theirs; in some cases, it is 83 per cent. When the comparison is with those in small companies, the figure is 58 per cent. However, that is on the assumption that we are doing a 40-hour week, as many people in those professions are. Can anyone imagine the outcry if the House or the Government had said to doctors, ““We're going to fix GPs' salaries, and there's going to be an assumption that they're doing only 40 hours a week””? We know that they work excessively long hours—60 or 70 hours a week—and their pay reflects that. Conversely, could we say to the chief executive of a small district council, who, it seems, is on £81,000, ““We'll pay you £81,000, but dear chap, you'll no longer work 40 hours a week; it's going up to 70””? There would be an outcry. So I believe that the SSRB has misled itself from the beginning in fixing as a fundamental principle that it does not consider the hours that MPs work or take the work load into account. If that were taken into account in a review, we may come out with slightly different comparators.