The public is right: we should pay MPs what they are properly worth
Nik Darlington 10.32am
On my way home yesterday I spotted this little story - ‘MPs should get £100,000 a year like doctors, says poll’ - tucked away amid the news pages of the Evening Standard:
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has launched a review of members’ salaries and its first evidence suggests they should get more.
For the first time, the authority is giving the public a say over MPs’ pay, which is now £65,738. It commissioned a survey to find which profession people felt MPs’ salaries should be linked with. The YouGov poll indicated it should be at the level of GPs, secondary school heads or senior army officers.
The poll did not feature figures, but average GP pay is £109,000, that of secondary heads is £73,000, and a colonel’s starting salary is £81,310.
First things first, it takes a scurrilously stirring sub to translate those figures into that headline. Neither does the poll say that MPs should be paid £100,000 per annum, nor does the Evening Standard’s own research say that GPs get £100,000. Increasingly so, GPs are opting to be salaried rather than partners in a practice, with take-home pay of something closer to £50,000 or £60,000. And in theory, there’s no limit to how much a partner can earn.
Going on tone and presentation, the point of the article is to make you, the reader, aghast at such a suggestion. This is unfair because the reality is that people - inadvertently or not - agree that MPs are undervalued relative to other public servants.
Consider a typical parliamentarian’s timetable. You work at least six days each week, sometimes seven. As the vast majority of MPs must commute a long distance to London during term time, your Sunday will habitually be disrupted by travelling too.
On the days that you are in Westminster you are often away from your family. Even if your family is with you in London, you hardly see them because your working day can be from 8 o’ clock in the morning until nearly midnight (or beyond) most Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Thursdays can be more relaxed as parliamentary business tends not to go far beyond late afternoon or early evening. So off you commute once more back to the constituency, probably to cheerlead on Twitter during BBC’s Question Time and beyond. Friday and quite often most of Saturday, your diary is filled with constituency appointments such as school visits, meetings with businesses, charities and other interest groups (aka ‘lobbyists’, of course) and surgeries for constituents.
In one week a MP might work up to 80 hours per week with as much as 5-10 hours of travelling time on top. Even outside term time, diaries remain filled (few newspaper references can rival those about “MPs’ holidays” for wilful ignorance).
The Evening Standard is correct to point out that a salary increase for MPs of this magnitude would be unhelpful when much of the rest of the public sector (nationalised banks aside, it seems) is subject to a pay freeze. I expect that IPSA will take this into account above all other factors.
Traditionally, MPs’ salaries had always been low because being an elected representative should be a calling to serve, not a career. Honourable (and desirable) as this ideal is, it is antediluvian, harking back to a time when MPs were from the upper-classes who didn’t need the money and from the lower-classes whose trade unions provided the money.
The MPs’ job description has widened from scrutinising and debating laws to a portfolio comprising campaigner, publicist, broadcaster, scribbler, social worker, pseudo-councillor, legislator and pliant punch-bag.
Some MPs may not deserve what they get, let alone a pay rise. John Walsh’s funny and explosive documentary of the 2010 general election, Tory Boy, catalogued the unabashed corruption, arrogance and apathy of one safe-seat Labour MP, Sir Stuart Bell. Middlesbrough’s MP, who holds a French knighthood as well as an ill-deserved British one, lives in Paris and hasn’t held a constituency surgery since 1997.
But most MPs do deserve it. We should pay them what they’re worth. Maybe not now, but soon.
