HC Deb 26 November 1963 vol 685 cc76-9
Mr. C. Pannell (by Private Notice)

asked Mr. Speaker on what date the Commissioners of the House resolved to advance the salaries of the Serjeants of this House, by what amount, and from what retrospective date.

Mr. Speaker

I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving me appropriate notice that he wanted to raise the matter of the salaries of the Serjeant at Arms, his Deputy and his Assistant.

For some years it has been the policy of the Commissioners for Regulating the Offices of the House of Commons that the salaries of all established posts in the service of the House should be linked with the salaries of those posts in the Civil Service which carry the most nearly comparable duties and responsibilities.

In April, 1962, the then Serjeant at Arms, Major-General Ivor Hughes, raised the question of the salaries of the senior posts, other than his own, within his Department, and it seemed desirable to me that the duties of all the senior officers in his Department should be re-examined in view of the change in their responsiblities since the war.

There had been no effective increase in the number of Officers in the Serjeant at Arms' Department since the eighteenth century. Accordingly, the Commissioners accepted the then Serjeant's recommendation to appoint a Deputy Assistant Serjeant at Arms with a salary on a scale slightly lower than that of the Assistant Serjeant at Arms. This appointment enabled the office work of the Serjeant at Arms' Department to be reorganised on a more logical basis, giving the new Deputy Assistant responsibility for the housekeeping side of the Department.

Meanwhile, the Treasury had arranged, at my request, for an investigation into the responsibilities and salaries of the senior officers of the Serjeant at Arms' Department. After studying this Report the Commissioners decided on 2nd November this year that the Assistant Serjeant at Arms should be linked with the post of Principal, that the Deputy Serjeant at Arms should be linked with the post of Assistant Secretary, and that the post of Serjeant at Arms should be linked with the post of Under-Secretary—all of them in the Civil Service.

It was decided that the salaries appropriate to these posts in the Civil Service should be paid to the officers concerned with effect from 1st April, 1963.

Mr. Pannell

Are you aware, Mr Speaker, that I have put down this Question not to call attention either to the salaries of the servants of the House, or to question their capacities in any way? Are you aware of the increasing concern in the House about the decreasing differentials between you and the functionaries of the House? Are you aware that there was a time when the Clerk of this House got £3,000 per annum less than you, but that he now gets £2,500 more and that you get even less than the Assistant Clerk?

Do you really think that the prestige of your great office can be maintained on this sort of differential? I am just wondering whether, if this sort of thing goes on, your successors, instead of being pulled to the Chair, will have to be pushed. I am also wondering whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the Cities of London and Westminster might accompany me on a deputation to the Prime Minister.

Quite seriously, will you take note of the fact that there is a great deal of feeling in the House that your position and the prestige of your office is becoming considerably undermined vis à vis the functionaries of this House, that if this place becomes a place which is decreasingly esteemed in the.country surely it must flow from what we do to the man who presides over us? Will you bear these sorts of thing in mind? Is it not possible in any way at all to give the House an opportunity to rectify something which we all consider a manifest injustice?

Mr. Speaker

I am obliged to the hon. Member for all that he says, but, happily or unhappily, as the case may be, the Speaker's salary does not rest in the realm of the Speaker's responsibility. What the hon. Member has said no doubt will be noted.

Mr. H. Wilson

No one will want to pursue you, Mr. Speaker, on this matter in which you are in a very invidious position, but it is only by putting Questions to you that this matter can be raised. In view of the general desire on both sides of the House for modernisation, which might, perhaps, start in this House, may I ask whether I am right in assuming, when you refer to the Commissioners who have to decide these things, that they are a group of officials—I think, Secretaries of State whose offices were in existence before 1819—who decide the salaries which you have quoted, and that the method of determination of Mr. Speaker's salary, which is a matter very many of us do feel strongly about—my hon. Friend is correct about that—is something quite different from the arrangements for determining the salaries of Members of Parliament, which is yet again quite different?

May I, Mr. Speaker, through you, suggest to the Leader of the House, who, we know, is now seized of the importance and urgency of dealing with the question of salaries of Members of Parliament and of Ministers, that he should take into consideration this other question as well and that he should look into the differentials between Members of Parliament and the Officers of the House you have mentioned, and should also take into account the wider consideration affecting yourself, in which you cannot intervene, but which my hon. Friend has drawn to the attention of the House through this quite unusual form of question?

Mr. Speaker

The right hon. Gentleman will help me to keep the House somewhat within its rules of order. I appreciate the difficulty that as to the activities of the Commissioners it is only possible to ask Questions of me as Chairman of the Commissioners. There is some difficulty in making that a machinery for asking Questions of the Leader of the House on other matters. No doubt, the matter can be raised in other ways.

Mr. S. Silverman

In considering the Question that my hon. Friend has addressed to you, Mr. Speaker, may I ask whether you are aware that the general principle of linking this kind of salary to an appropriate grade in the Civil Service for pension and salary purposes has wide support in the House?

Mr. Speaker

I am obliged to the hon. Member.