---

Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I hope that every hon. Member will support the Government's motion to keep our pay increase in line with those for the rest of the public sector. That is essential for our self-respect. If we do that, we can then look the police and other public servants in the eye and say that what is good enough for them is good enough for us. If we do not, I fear that, as a profession, we risk sinking even lower in the public's esteem than we are at the moment, and we would have only ourselves to blame. On the question of linkage, I think that everyone agrees that it is a matter of perennial embarrassment to most of us that we are called upon to determine our own remuneration. In speech after speech, going back more than 30 years, hon. Members have lamented that fact and called for the matter to be taken out of our hands, yet here we are, 30 years on, and it is still in our hands. The difficulty with all previous attempts to index our pay is that they were complicated and completely incomprehensible to the outside world. The 1996 motion, for example, described an increase by"““the average percentage by which the mid-points of the Senior Civil Service pay bands having effect from 1st of April of that year have increased compared with the previous 1st of April.””" That is not very comprehensible even to us, who obviously take more interest in our pay, let alone to those in the outside world. Another difficulty has been the one that I mentioned in an intervention on the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), namely that, every so often, the SSRB or its equivalent has recommended an increase that was way out of line with what was going on in the rest of the world. That has happened under Governments of all persuasions, and they have felt obliged to intervene and impose, or attempt to impose, some sanity. It is my contention that there is no need to look for a complicated solution when a simple one is available. So, in July 2001, in the hope of putting an end to this nonsense once and for all, I proposed that future increases be increased by the average of the annual awards to nurses, teachers, doctors and dentists. As it happens, if that had come to pass, we would all have done rather well, as those professions tend to do well under Labour Governments, although not all of them are prepared to admit it. However, my proposal was dismissed out of hand by the then Leader of the House, Robin Cook, with the result that we yet again find ourselves back in the same old mess. Today, my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House of Commons is proposing, with the best of motives, another review. I fear, however, that after much learned deliberation, such a review is likely to saddle us with yet another unworkable solution. In an effort to avoid going round the same old track again, I tabled an amendment—which, regrettably, has not been selected—proposing to link future salary increases to the state old-age pension, thereby permanently and irrevocably linking our fortunes to those of the humblest of our constituents.