I’ve been increasingly intrigued by the saga of MPs’ pay rises. Both Gordon Brown’s insistence that MPs must only get a rise in line with other areas of the public sector and Cameron’s willingness to row in behind him strikes me as wrong. For both men, the paramount concern is image.
Apart from being exemplary of a wider flaw in our system that image still remains more of a pre-occupation than addressing systemic problems, the approach is deeply naïve. There is a consistent whinge that MPs are either incompetent or corrupt; in essence, that we need better people. One only has to look at recent generations of MPs on all sides of the house to question whether or not Parliament is attracting a high enough calibre of person. Perhaps one of the reasons Parliament is becoming irrelevant is because the elected chamber is simply not good enough, either as individuals, or as a collective.
If we want the best people for the job, MPs have to be paid more competitively. Yes, there should be recognition that there is an element of public service, but that can be said of the appropriate comparators. A full time Circuit Judge is paid just short of £100,000. Many GPs now get paid in excess of £100,000, as do civil servants at higher levels.Given we are entrusting MPs to legislate on our behalf, to scrutinise laws, lay down systems of criminal and social acceptability, and reflect our views, we need them to be the best of the best. At the moment many of them are the embodiment of mediocrity, or worse. If the rewards were brought back in to line with appropriate comparators we might be able to address the problem. If MPs don’t have the appetite to address the issue on their own and award themselves the necessary pay rise, then farming the deicion out to an independent body is the only way forward. It’s about time MPs got paid six figures, not to reward the present incumbents, but to attract fresh blood.
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That’s an interesting idea- tying it into the national average. Some of our MPs (all Parties) are great, and some are just…not…, how do we attract a better calibre of candidates?
money! let people who are rising to the top of their professions and earning lots see that they can do a public service job and not take such a severe pay cut
Pay them x times the national average wage(haven’t thought whether it ought to be mean, median or mode). Argue about x but it means payments by results: if we do well then they do well.