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Superannuation Bill

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention. In some cases, it seems, one can talk about parity, and in other cases about equality. If one is favour of it, one might use one word, but if one is against it, use the other. The important point here is that we need to look at overall compensation packages and overall pay, including pensions and other terms and conditions of work. That brings me back to the issue of fairness across the sectors. If we are to have a modern civil service and a modern flexible economy that work in the future, we also need to allow transfer between the two sectors. Bringing into line the working practices in the two is no bad thing; nor is bringing into line the redundancy payoffs as the Bill does—and, indeed, as the right hon. Lady's former proposals did. The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) raised an interesting point when he argued that we should put the members of the unions ahead of the rest of our constituents. I think that the most important thing for a new MP to do is to represent all of their constituents, not just those who are members of a union. My final point is about fairness in employment practices. I asked the House of Commons Library about the concept of priority posting pools, which are groups of civil servants who are given nothing to do, but cannot be let go because of the cost of the redundancy package. The Library determined that there were a total of 1,946 such civil servants. When people working for their country have completed their jobs and their projects, it cannot be fair to tell them, ““We would like to pay you to do nothing. We cannot find anything useful for you to do. We do not think you would be any good at doing anything else, but we cannot afford to get rid of you, so we are going to carry on paying you.”” As of January 2010, there were 1,946 such people in the civil service. I believe it is unfair to them not to have a flexible employment system so that we can have a grown-up and modern civil service working for the future. Such is my argument. We are here to look at the fairness of this Bill as well as other aspects of it. If we want to spend public money fairly, rebalance our economy fairly and try to improve the fairness of working practices in civil service employment, we should support the Bill. The alternative is defending £500,000 payouts, an unbalanced economy and out-of-date working practices. I do not want to defend those things, so I will support the Bill this evening.