Members' Salaries and Pensions

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:47 pm on 11 July 1979.

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Photo of Mr Phillip Whitehead Mr Phillip Whitehead , Derby North 3:47, 11 July 1979

The fact that I intend to speak to the amendments in my name and those tabled by hon. Friends means that I cannot follow the remarks of the right hon. Member for Stafford and Stone (Mr. Fraser) in the larger considerations which he pursued. I begin by saying a word or two to my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green (Mr. Race) and the right hon. Member for Down, South (Mr. Powell). The first is a newish Member of the House and the second is of course a very senior Member, but both spoke with considerable courage against the grain of the debate. The fact that I do not wholly agree with them does not diminish my admiration for their speeches. My remarks are relevant to the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends and myself, and it is for that reason that I wish to draw together the two speeches which I have mentioned.

The right hon. Member for Down, South said that we were in this Parliament voting ourselves a 50 per cent. increase. He based that statement on the fact that in the previous Parliament, since the Boyle recommendations were not implemented, and since in successive years we had to take increases in other ways, rather than in salary, the real income of a Member of Parliament, taking into account all the allowances, had not significantly fallen back.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green thought that these allowances should be further examined and perhaps raised. In the course of the previous Parliament I felt that it was not a good thing that we shirked acceptance of the Boyle recommendations and then, through the back door, increased allowances. The public know little about such allowances, and in some cases they might well have been used in part to alleviate the hardship which hon. Members had otherwise suffered. The allowances should be paid on the basis that we are, effectively, full-time Members of Parliament. That does not mean that we should not have outside interests. It means that we are working here as a full-time occupation.

The allowance should go entirely upon the services which we have to employ or on other expenses. The public should not be under an illusion that the allowances are a supplement to our income. It is better for hon. Members to have the courage to say that they believe that there is a given salary which they think the job is worth. They should argue that in their constituencies. We should not wear hair shirts and say that we do not think that we should be paid this, that or the other because that would not be popular outside the House.

We must take the starting point of Boyle and the salary that that committee nominated and then examine the premise upon which the recommendations were based. That premise represents the substance of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friends and myself. The premise is that we should be considered as full-time Members. The Boyle report states: In basing our salary recommendations on the 'full-time MP' we do not mean to imply that Parliament should consist entirely of Members who have no interests outside Parliament, whether remunerated or not. Paragraph 18 of the report states: An alternative open to us would be to recommend different levels of payment for full-time' and for part-time' MPs. However, as in the 1971 report, the Boyle committee declined to do that.

My right hon. and hon. Friends and I believe that that is a mistaken view. If we are to move towards the concept of a full-time Member of Parliament, we must accept that that means a remuneration for the full-time Member of Parliament which is somewhat different from that of the hon. Member who, for reasons of his own, chooses to spend large parts of his time elsewhere. However, fewer hon. Members do that now.

The figures in the Boyle report show that the average number of hours which hon. Members claim to have worked in the working week in the last Session is 67. That is many more hours than the 42 mentioned earlier. Even if one allows for a little exaggeration and reduces that number by 10 hours, we are still talking about a considerable number of hours. We should look to this place as the prime occupation of hon. Members—not their sole occupation. An hon. Member could have an outside interest or occupation without expecting remuneration for it. If an hon. Member has no other remuneration, he is in a better position to argue for the full salary recommended in the Boyle report. In a couple of years' time that will be £12,000 per year.

We believe that we should work upon one of the examples in the appendices of the report. Since there is a large Conservative majority there is likely to be little sympathy for the notion of the full-time MP with no outside earnings or interests. The example involves the Dutch Parliament. Dutch MPs are paid generously. Their standard of living is higher. A Dutch MP's rate of pay is £20,500 if he has no outside interest. If he has outside interests in excess of £2,500 his salary is reduced by half the amount which exceeds that, given that the final deduction cannot be more than £7,500. That means that the minimum salary for all Dutch MPs is £13,000.

The point is that all hon. Members must be paid, whether they are monks or millionaires. We pay a parliamentary allowance to ministers, although the idea that a Minister is caused hardship when earning £12,000 a year is absurd to those who move in political circles. The figure that we should take as the parliamentary allowance, or that part of the parliamentary salary that is paid to everybody regardless, should be set roughly at the figure which the House has estimated should be paid to Ministers of State and others, in the third section of table 1 to the motion.

My hon. Friends and I have taken that principle in setting out a suggested process of deduction which should find favour in the House, even among those who would not necessarily agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer), who has tabled a tougher and more Draconian amendment to cover those with outside interests. We recommend that for those earning over £2,000 in outside income half of that declared outside income for the last tax year should be deducted from the parliamentary salary up to an initial maximum of £3,800, a maximum of £4,400 during stage 2 and £5,000 during stage 3. That is a more modest suggestion than the notion that one should simply take away from a parliamentary salary every last penny earned outside. That would not work, in any event.

That suggestion would mean that an hon. Member who earned £3,000 outside in the previous year would have a deduction of £500 in the first stage or a pre-tax parliamentary income of £8,950. A member earning £6,000 outside would draw a parliamentary salary of £7,450. A Member earning £12,000 outside would draw £5,650, and that would involve the maximum deduction.

Hon. Members may say that everyone should take the £12,000 because they all have constituency responsibilities. It is easier to argue the case that we should be paid the rate for the job when we can illustrate that that rate is based on the notion that most of us are doing this job and are receiving no other remuneration. Ministers can take no other remuneration. When a Member becomes a Minister, all his outside income must cease. According to the codes that govern the lives of civil servants, they are not able to take outside remuneration.

Some hon. Members say that our salaries should be linked to those of assistant secretaries in the Civil Service. They should remember that such civil servants cannot earn the amounts which Members of Parliament can earn outside. If we are to link and say that the job, as a full-time job, deserves the going rate, we must accept the principle of deduction. This is an important stage along the route which I hope we shall take in the next Parliament to when our occupation is seen to be full-time. I am not saying that hon. Members should not be able to do things outside, but that they should not take remuneration for it. I accept that that will not happen in this Parliament, but I hope that it will in the next. We are considering part I of the Boyle report. We have not seen Boyle part II. We do not know whether we shall see it before the summer. I hope that we shall and that we shall hear that the Government intend to honour it and act upon it as soon as it is published.

The chairman of the Committee which in the previous Parliament looked at the conditions of secretaries and research assistants came to the conclusion that some are badly treated. It would be odious to go into detail, but there are cases of real hardship. I pay tribute to the Accountant and to the officials of the House who have attempted to assist. However, we should not treat those who serve us less well than we treat ourselves. It is ridiculous that secretaries here should be in this curious relationship with hon. Members, which is not at all regulated as is any other secretarial occupation outside this place. According to the figures in the motion, they are being given less than a 10 per cent. increase in the secretarial allowance. That is nothing like the figure which has been given as the increase for secretaries in the Civil Service, which has recently been announced. The secretaries council—with some reason, I think—is indignant that we have come to look at Boyle part I without looking at Boyle part II, without trying to put on a more regular basis the conditions of the secretaries. Looking at the nonsense of the so-called secretarial allowance, one finds, first, that it covers three different things, secretaries, research assistants and office equipment, and, secondly, that it is not always used solely for those three purposes. I shall not go into that matter any more.

However, it is wrong that we have allowances which are not clearly delineated for the particular job that we need —in the first instance, a full-time secretary working for us here, with decent office conditions, a regular pension and all the expectations that people have outside.

I do not believe that hon. Members would wish to leave this debate without hearing from the Government this evening what they intend to do when they get the second part of the Boyle recommendations. I do not believe that we should simply take the money and run, at the end of the summer now, and vote tonight in favour of this statement of opinion, or whatever it may be. I earnestly commend the amendments that have been put forward by my hon. Friends and myself. I hope that, at least on my side of the House, they will find some favour.