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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I am not in favour of our trying to identify yet again another civil service grade to which we can be linked, because it has got us into all sorts of difficulties in the past. On one occasion, I believe that the grade was abolished, so we found ourselves promptly back where we had started. Let me repeat that I am looking for something that is easily defensible and easily explicable to our constituents in the outside world and that will not get us back here debating the subject every three or four years as we are today. I fear that Sir John is going to come up with something—I am sure it will be independent—that either the Government will feel obliged to interfere with or will not be viewed as credible in the outside world. It fills me with despair to think that the first of these debates I participated in was in 1987 and that it was exactly the same as today's: everyone was lamenting the fact that we were all here again discussing our own wages and everyone had their own complex formula for sorting it out. Nevertheless, here we are, 21 years later, going through it all again. I read the debate of 1975 and there was Edward Short at the Dispatch Box, talking about a formula linked to a civil service grade—but here we are yet again. I want to see us putting a stop to all that and doing something simple and easily explicable to the outside world. When the Deputy Leader of the House concludes the debate, I would like to hear some assurance that in their evidence to the review the Government will emphasise to Sir John the need for a formula that is simple, workable, easily understood and morally defensible.