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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

My hon. Friend is respected in all parts of the House for the tremendous amount of work he has done in chairing our pensions committee. No one can speak with more authority on House of Commons pensions than he can. I hope his words will carry weight in all parts of the House. I quote the examples from the report not because I want us automatically to link our salaries to them, but to show where I believe the SSRB has slightly misdirected itself. I hope that if we on the MEC can do a review, we would not tie our hands in such a way, we would consider the workload and the hours that we work in addition to the other factors, and we would look at a basket of comparable jobs in the public sector and the private sector, and not limit ourselves to the basket that is included in the report. There is a range of other comparators that could be included in the basket. From what I have seen of the staff of the Fees Office and the Directorate of Resources and the expert researchers in the House of Commons Library, I believe that we could come up with recommendations as good as, if not better than, those that Sir John will produce. And there will be something else. Sir John will make his recommendations to the Government. That is fair enough, and I accept entirely the assurances of the Leader of the House that the Government will not sit on the report for six months this time; it will be brought quickly to the House. If we, the Members Estimates Committee, had given the stamp of approval to bring forward proposals to the House today, we would be reporting to all Members—to the House. At some point it would be up to the House collectively and all Members to grasp the nettle of what we had proposed. If all colleagues thought that what we proposed was nonsense, it would soon be binned. If they thought it was right, we could go ahead with it. I know that my amendment refers to an independent pay review body. I am not tied to that. I had to submit my amendment rather hastily. If I were to redraft it, I would refer to an independent pay mechanism. That is what we must seek to achieve—a mechanism that could be linked to a basket of salaries or something else, and which would be uprated each year by the Fees Office. The Directorate of Resources would look at the comparators and the mechanism and automatically adjust it. If at some future date it went all askew, the House would have to grasp the nettle and do something about it. Any independent pay review should report to the House, not the Government. That takes the Government's hand out of the matter. I will support the Leader of the House this afternoon on her motion of expression of opinion. I have no wish to rock the boat on that. However, I beg those on the Government Front Bench to accept my amendment and let the MEC have a go at producing proposals. I know that the Leader of the House said that we could produce a memorandum. We do not need the authority of the House to produce a memorandum, a document or a review. The MEC can do that, but we do not have the automatic right to have it considered on the same day as Sir John's report. It could sit on the shelf in the Vote Office. Yes, we could take the guts out of it and table it in an amendment, but as the MEC is chaired by Mr. Speaker, we cannot have an amendment advocated in the House by a Committee of which the Speaker and the Leader of the House are members. I seek a commitment from those on the Front Bench. I would happily withdraw my amendment. I do not particularly want a vote on it, but I know that a head of steam has built up from colleagues on both sides because what I am proposing is reasonable and innocuous. If we produce a memorandum or a document of some sort—we are not in the business of an alternative review; I am not rubbishing Sir John at all—please let us have it considered at the same time as Sir John's report, as an alternative. That would remove a difficulty for the Government and for everyone else, except perhaps myself given the work load of the MEC in producing this.