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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I think that I entered the House a little later than the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), but I remember that one of the very first debates that I attended in 1983 was about Members' pay, and exactly the same issues that have been rehearsed today were rehearsed then. We sensibly decided on that occasion to link pay to a grade in the civil service. I did not think that it was particularly ambitious to link our pay to 78 per cent. of that of a principal officer—just one above the fast-stream entry grade—but, nevertheless, it resolved the problem for quite a long period. I want to talk about two issues. One has had a lot of attention and the other has not, so hopefully I can shorten my speech. The one that has had a lot of attention is what the uprating mechanism should be. As the hon. Gentleman said, I personally think that it should be simple and comprehensible, not just to us but to our constituents. I would have thought that it should be something like the annual percentage increase in public sector pay. The Government are concerned that our pay must take account of their public sector pay policy, and that mechanism would. The Government are in one way or another negotiating if not setting public sector pay, and we would be one year ahead of it—or behind it, whichever way one looks at it. I believe that if our uprating on, let us say, 31 March every year were linked to the average increase in public sector pay over the previous 12 months, that would take the problem away. The Government, whether Labour or Conservative or anything else, must keep their hands off this matter. When they interfere, they simply make the problem worse for themselves. They lower the increases for three or four years, which they think helps. Actually, I do not think that the press care; whatever we do, they will be unhappy with us. Whether it is 1 per cent. or 10 per cent., we will get the same bad publicity. If the Government interfere to suppress annual pay increases—I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House takes this on board—they can do it for four or five years, and then we will insist on having a whacking great catch-up increase and it will look awful. Were the increase 2.5 to 3.5 per cent. a year, or whatever the general rate of increase in the public sector was, that would satisfy us and the public, and would not create these horrendous problems. Linking it to public sector pay is the way to go, but I would be happy to consider any other index that is suggested. I must pick up a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean). This is a House of Commons matter, not a Government matter. The hon. Member for Sunderland, South said that the trouble is that the Government control the matter, but they do not. When it comes back to the House, I hope that some amendments will be tabled by Back Benchers, and that we will be allowed to vote on them. The Government do not control this; they control about 100 votes, but the rest of us can speak and vote for ourselves. A fair amount of remarks have been made about the erosion in our pay, and I do not need to reiterate those. Had the mechanism that we had agreed been followed, however, we would now be paid between £65,000 and £66,000 a year. Were we to continue to allow the erosion of our pay relative to other people, or to the public sector, that problem would sooner or later get so bad that it would have an effect on the sort of people who get into this place. If we want to fill it with people who are either fanatics or rich, that is the way to go, but it is not sensible. There are people who would do the job for nothing—I would be happy to present ““Newsnight”” for nothing—but whether they are the right people is a different question. It is not the right way of qualifying for a job. We certainly do not want to fill the place up, as we did until about 100 years ago, with people who have significant other sources of income. I want to turn to the second point. Once we have the uprating mechanism agreed, what is the starting point? Is it what we are paid now? Is it £66,000, £66,170 or what it would have been if we had had the uprating as agreed? Is it something different? I do not think that the study done for the Baker review was right. Comparing the skills that Members of Parliament bring to the job is not the right way to decide what they should be paid. We 646 Members constitute a huge variety of people. Some of us have enormous earning potential out of this place, and some of us do not. Some of us have professional qualifications, and others do not. But we all come here equal, and while we are here we are all equal, and we all need to be paid the same. Trying to compare the skill levels and the hours of work will not produce a satisfactory answer. What we ought to do is look at what other people in the public sector are paid. I made a start with the people employed by the House of Commons Commission, all five members of which have spoken in this debate. It employs just over 1,500 people, of whom 92 are paid more than Members of Parliament. I expect that all of those people are properly paid—at one stage, when I was in the Treasury, I was responsible for civil service pay and an enormous amount of attention was given to trying to get the right pay grades to recruit, retain and motivate civil servants, and I am sure that a lot of attention is paid to their salaries. But is it right that 10 people in the Department of the Official Report are paid more than us, along with 10 people in the Department of Finance and Administration, 21 people in the Clerk's Department—that might be more understandable—13 people in the Information Communications and Technology Department, two people in catering, six in the Library and nine in the Serjeant at Arms Department? There is a status issue. We are not just putting in hours of work, being social workers for our constituencies, or giving vent to our views on the great events of the day. Members of Parliament have some sort of status as well. We have to consider where that should place us on the public sector pay scale. I find it difficult to believe that my status, and that of all of us, in the public sector is less than 92 people who work for us for the House of Commons Commission. I have looked at one or two other areas of the public sector—I do not pretend that there is any system to the areas that I have examined. We are paid at the low end of what a lieutenant colonel in the Army or commander in the Navy is paid. We are paid at the low end of what a police superintendent is paid. Lieutenant colonels in the Army, commanders in the Navy and police superintendents are often—this is certainly the case in the armed forces—bright 38-year-olds who are going somewhere. Is that the right end of the pay scale for us, or should we be paid in conjunction with a higher grade? When we look at pay in local government, we really do find out how badly paid we are. There are 852 officers working in 34 county councils who are paid more than Members of Parliament. Our pay is the same as about the middle rate paid to what is called a third-tier manager, and the third tier does not include the chief executive. The order is chief executive, first tier, second tier, third tier. There are 1,000 officers in district councils who are paid more than us, and we are slightly higher than the top end of the second tier. The order is chief executive, first tier, second tier. Then there are the metropolitan councils, the unitaries and all the rest. Nearly 7,000 officers in local government are paid more than Members of Parliament. Is that really how we see ourselves? Is it the right place for us to be? There are 4,000 members of the senior civil service who are paid more than Members of Parliament. I do not agree with the methodology of the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, but I was interested by the suggestion that our comparator was a grade 1 civil servant. For those of us who go back a while, that is equivalent to the old grade 3 or grade 4 under-secretary level. The average pay of grade 1 civil servants is about £71,000 a year and their average bonus is about £10,000, so we are looking at about £80,000 a year. There is a grade 1a, at which the pay is about £10,000 or £12,000 more. It may be a bad idea to take a look at the pay scales of the judiciary, but let us look at the bottom end, level 7. The chairman of an employment tribunal or an immigration judge receives £98,000 a year. At level 6, a Land Registry adjudicator or the regional chairman of a mental health tribunal—we are not talking about the Court of Appeal or the High Court—is paid £117,000. We will all have views on where we sit on the scale, but I think we must consider where we as Members of Parliament see ourselves in relation to other people in the public sector. I very much hope that we shall be able to choose the right level in future, and I shall seek to table amendments to that effect when the issue returns to the House. I think that we should table a series of amendments suggesting levels £5,000 apart rising from £60,000 to £100,000, because I consider the right amount to be somewhere between the two. My own view is that it is in the £75,000 to £85,000 region, but I think there should be a series of amendments on which we can vote. We will take a lot of flak once, but we will settle the issue of what the base should be before whatever uprating mechanism on which we agree comes into effect.