03 July 2013

By Roger Jeary

MPs might well say a rise in their pay is unacceptable, but they do so in case their salaries cost them votes, not because of the evident injustice of raising their salaries at a time of massive public sector spending cuts…

So the independent body set up to determine MP’s pay is expected to propose an increase of 15% raising the basic MP salary to £75,000 by 2015. MPs are able to feign incredulity in the safe knowledge that they do not have the power to reject this proposal and party leaders, to a man, are indicating that they think such a rise in the current circumstances is unacceptable.

Of course they are right, it is incredible that we could contemplate a rise in public servants (that’s what MPs are isn’t it?) pay at a time when all other public servants have been asked to accept freezes or minimum increases of 1% on pay and just recently have been told by the Chancellor that progression increases will be abolished. This on top of being told to pay more for less for their pensions which are far from ‘gold plated’, unlike those of MPs.

But the rationale for the politicians to say that increases of this size would be unacceptable is not that MPs don’t deserve it, but that it would be politically unacceptable. That is, it will cost us credibility and worse still votes. But at a time when all other public servants are being asked to accept pay cuts and job losses perhaps we should be looking at what it is that IPSA could possibly have found to suggest that an MP is actually worth £75,000 per annum.

A job which has accountability once every 5 years and which in the main is not determined by performance but by the political colour of the constituency is not as insecure as a public servant in other capacities where jobs are dependent upon government funding and public policy. The skill set is also something I have often wondered about. What are the skills needed for someone who attends Parliament for about half of the year and may or may not take part in debates on a few occasions; someone who takes up constituents’ issues – normally by writing a letter or two to the appropriate Minister or government agency and relaying back the reply; or the more active MP that sits on a Select Committee and takes part in holding government ministers and senior civil servants to account.

To me, it seems that the current level of pay more than compensates for the skill set necessary to meet these demands and when you add a still generous expense system and a real ‘gold plated’ pensions scheme, not to mention a redundancy payment when someone has the temerity to vote you out of office, then the package for a job which requires no qualifications starts to look extremely good.

So please don’t let us see crocodile tears coming from MPs about being hard done by, or the public not understanding what they do and the long hours they put in. I have been around MPs long enough to know that given the opportunity there are many who would settle for their life at the current price. Of course there are honourable exceptions to the generality that I have described, but then they won’t be the ones demanding higher pay while all around them are made to suffer.