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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

The speech by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) showed how the debate has gone today, with people of massive experience across the House speaking very seriously about very serious issues. I do not have the experience that he has in the matters that he discussed, but I do have the experience of being involved as a trade union activist and negotiator for the best part of four decades. Going right back to the early 1970s, I was involved in a national strike, as were some of my hon. Friends sitting in front of me. In 1972, miners were getting paid the paltry sum of £26 a week; we went on strike and ended up with the fantastic sum of £35 a week. I go from that experience to the early 2000s, when I was involved in the negotiations on the agenda for change, which covered 1.5 million workers in the health service, and single status in local government, which covered 1 million workers. I would therefore argue that I have, if not expertise, some experience in this area. Throughout all those years, I have never seen a pay round so badly handled by a Government. Without a doubt, the Treasury has had its fingerprints over all the public sector pay deals this year, so that we have ended up in the situation in which we find ourselves, both as public servants and as representatives of millions of public servants outside. Nurses should have been given the pay that they were due, because they were covered by a pay review body, as were prison officers, who did not get what they were due either, and ultimately ended up going out on strike; now they are facing legal challenges in this House. Obviously, as a former miner I do not have a lot of time for the police, given the history between us, but on a point of principle they should have been given what their pay review body said that they were entitled to. The key thing about pay review bodies is that they were not settled on by some sort of whim, but mainly to try to avert or resolve disputes, and they have been very successful in that. They should have been respected, but they have not been. The sad thing about where we are today is that our pay review body should be respected, but because of how the Treasury has handled the situation in the past nine months, we cannot legitimately say that we want our piece of the cake if our constituents—our fellow public servants—are denied their share of it. We therefore have no option other than to agree to the Government's position on the 1.9 per cent. We need to learn a lesson from this—that pay review bodies and deals must mean something. We must have a mechanism that works, but it must be simple, too. My blood ran cold when the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean), in a very good speech, talked about job evaluation and comparators. When he said that we should look at responsibility, but not at workload or hours worked, I was taken back to 10 years of knocking my head against a brick wall trying to implement the single status agreement in local government, when the very same things were said, and where we have ended up with ordinary men and women facing court cases because they cannot get agreement on equal pay, and suchlike. We need a very simple mechanism, and it is not beyond the wit of people in this Chamber to achieve that. I ask my Front-Bench colleagues to listen to what the people on the Members Estimate Committee have said and work with them, because, as was clearly shown by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West, they have an element of expertise that the so-called experts have not shown. We are where we are, and we need to get away from it; part of that is about involving the people whom we entrust with looking after our own interests.