Members' Salaries

HC Deb 05 June 1981 vol 5 cc1201-58

Mr. Speaker

I suggest that it would be for the convenience of the House if we discussed all the motions and selected amendments together before taking separate votes at 2.30 pm.

Mr. Bob Cryer (Keighley)

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will have seen and considered the amendment supported by 15 Labour Members which relates to full-time Members of Parliament being paid the full salary. While regretting that the amendment has not been chosen, I seek your guidance on the question whether a wide range of debate incorporating what is stated in the amendment will be possible, in view of the fact that the main motion is an expression of opinion.

Mr. Speaker

The hon. Member, like other hon. Members whose amendments are not selected, will be able to express his opinion if he is fortunate enough to catch the eye of the occupant of the Chair.

9.36 am

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Paymaster General and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Francis Pym)

I beg to move, That, in the opinion of this House, the salaries payable to Members of this House in respect of services on and after 13th June 1981 should be at the following yearly rates—

1. (1) £13,950 for Members not falling within paragraph (2); and
2. (2) £8,130 for Officers of this House and Members receiving a salary under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 or a pension under section 26 of the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972.

With this we shall be discussing three further motions standing in my name. The first is: That the salaries payable to Members of this House in respect of service on and after 13th June 1981 shall be at the following yearly rates—

1. (1) £13,950 for Members not falling within paragraph (2); and
2. (2) £8,130 for Officers of this House and Members receiving a salary under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 or a pension under section 26 of the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972.

The second is: That, in the opinion of this House—

1. (a)the limit on the allowance payable to a Member of this House in respect of the aggregate expenses incurred by him for his parliamentary duties as general office expenses, on secretarial assistance and on research assistance should be £8,384 for the year ending 31st March 1982 and £8,480 for any subsequent year; and
2. (b) provision should be made to enable each Member in receipt of the allowance to contribute sums, not exceeding in the year ending 31st March 1982 £838 and in any subsequent year £848, to an approved pension scheme for the provision of pensions or other benefits for or in respect of persons in the payment of whose salaries expenses are incurred by him; and
3. (c) provision should be made under arrangements approved by Mr. Speaker to enable a Member in receipt of the allowance to incur further expenses for his parliamentary duties by obtaining temporary secretarial or research assistance while a person to whom a salary is paid by him is prevented through illness from providing such assistance.

For the purposes of this resolution expenses which, at a time when Parliament is dissolved, are incurred in connection with his former or prospective parliamentary duties by a person who was a Member immediately before the dissolution shall be treated as incurred by him as a Member and for his parliamentary duties. The third is: That the draft Ministerial and other Salaries Order 1981, which was laid before this House on 1st June, be approved. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has already told the House, in answer to a parliamentary question by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), of the Government's proposals for the coming year on the pay of hon. Members and Ministers and on secretarial allowances. Essentially, we propose a 6 per cent. increase in 1981. However, because of the withholding and staging of previous pay settlements, the position is a little complicated and has been misrepresented. I should therefore like to speak about each of the motions in turn.

I take first the pay of hon. Members. In 1979, the Top Salaries Review Body recommended a salary of £12,000 for hon. Members who were not Ministers or other office holders. The Government accepted the figure, but because the existing salary at the time was only £6,897 we felt that the increase was too great to be paid in one go. It was therefore agreed by the House that the new salary should be introduced in three stages. The first stage was in 1979, and gave hon. Members a salary of £9,450. The second stage, of £10,725, came into payment last year. The third stage is due this year.

A year ago, the review body's report dealing with 1980 recommended that the second and third stages should be increased by 14.6 per cent. to take account of inflation. Again, the Government felt that this was too large an increase, particularly in view of the need for strict pay restraint. Our proposal, which was accepted by the House, was for a 9.6 per cent. increase to both stages. This was 5 per cent. less than the increase recommended by the review body.

This meant that hon. Members received a salary of £11,750 from 13 June 1980 and will automatically receive the third stage increase to £13,150 from the corning 13 June—that is next week—as a result of the resolution of the House passed last year. I stress that the increase from £11,750 to £13,150 was agreed as the right amount in 1980. In other words, that increase is being taken by hon. Members, if they agree to the motions, a year late.

In any case, it makes no provision for 1981. In my view, it cannot fairly be argued that because hon. Members have shown restraint in the past and have therefore still to receive what is due to them from previous settlements, they should not get any increase specifically for this year.

As the House knows, the review body reported again this year. Partly because of uncertainty about how hon. Members' pay would be determined in the future and partly because the rates that it recommended in 1980 had not been implemented, it felt unable to recommend a new rate. Instead, it urged us to implement the rate that it had recommended for 1980.

The Government considered that a 6 per cent. increase in hon. Members' salaries in 1981 would be fair and reasonable, in the light of the 6 per cent. increase in the pay factor in cash limits that we have set for the public services generally. So we propose that hon. Members' salaries should be £13,950 with effect from 13 June. That would take their pay to just a little above the rate that was considered appropriate by the review body for application a year ago. Now that we have completed the staging process, the rate of pensionable pay will, of course, be the same as the rate of actual pay.

Many commentators have combined the third stage increase, which had been withheld from previous years, with the additional 6 per cent. that we are proposing for this year. They claim from that that hon. Members are getting an 18.7 per cent. increase. I can only say that unless properly explained, that is misleading. In terms of the 1981 settlement—the only matter that we have to decide today—the increase that we are proposing is 6 per cent.—no more and no less. I hope that the House will agree that it is a right and fair increase. I cannot see how we can go higher when public service groups of employees have been offered only that much. There is no case for that. Equally, I see no justice in giving less.

It should be remembered that since 1972, when hon. Members' salaries were last brought fully up to date in Top Salaries Review Body terms, prices have increased by 246 per cent., whereas even with the 6 per cent. increase now proposed, hon. Members' salaries will have increased by 210 per cent. That is considerably less than the increase in prices.

Mr. John Bruce-Gardyne (Knutsford)

Surely my right hon. Friend is not suggesting that the House, which probably does more than any other institution to perpetuate and encourage inflation, should seek to insulate itself against the effects of its own achievements.

Mr. Pym

No, Sir. I am not proposing that, nor, as I have just explained, have we done so. In terms of inflation, we are in fact worse off. Therefore, that is taken fully into account. Perhaps that fact will give my hon. Friend the assurance and lead that he seeks. Those hon. Members who are wondering whether to accept the increases proposed in my motion may be encouraged to know that they will still be worse off in real terms.

I remind the House that two similar motions on pay are on the Order Paper, that being the normal procedure.

Mr. Cranley Onslow (Woking)

Before my right hon. Friend leaves the matter of the effect of inflation on our salaries, will he complete the picture by telling the House about allowances during the same period?

Mr. Pym

I shall come to allowances in a moment. They can be drawn by hon. Members precisely to the extent that hon. Members use and require them. In other words, they are a reimbursement of expenses up to the maximum limit and cannot be taken into account with salaries, which are a remuneration for the job that we do here. Allowances can be claimed only for expenses actually incurred directly relating to parliamentary business.

Mr. Mike Thomas (Newcastle upon Tyne, East)

To complete the picture, the right hon. Gentleman should tell us what has been the rise in earnings in the community as a whole, compared with the rise in our earnings. Have not earnings in the community as a whole in the period concerned rather outstripped inflation and left us even further behind? The idea, suggested by the hon. Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne), that we seek to advantage ourselves, is romantic fiction.

Mr. Pym

The hon. Gentleman is right. I cannot give the precise percentage for the average increase in earnings, but they have increased by more than the rate of inflation. Considered from that point of view, Members of Parliament have treated themselves even less favourably.

I was talking about the two motions on the Order Paper. The first is an expression of opinion and can be freely amended, but the second bears the Queen's Recommendation and cannot be amended, except to decrease the amount. The second motion is required because an effective resolution of the House to increase Members' pay leads to an increase in Exchequer contributions to the pension fund. Accordingly, any motion leading to such an increase formally requires the Queen's Recommendation. The House may recall that a motion bearing the Queen's Recommendation is necessary to increase the pay of United Kingdom members of the European Assembly, in line with those Members of this House. If the motion framed as an expression of opinion finds favour with the House, the second effective motion will be moved immediately afterwards.

I come now to allowances. The increases here have not been staged, and therefore no catching up is involved. Last year the review body recommended that the rate of the allowance should be £8,000, and that was approved by the House. This year the review body proposes a 7.5 per cent. increase to £8,600. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made clear in her answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton, the Government consider that at a time when pay increases for other groups of public servants are being held within a cash limit of 6 per cent. and hon. Members are being asked to limit their salaries in a similar way, increases in allowances should also be kept within the same limit. We therefore propose that the secretarial and research assistance allowance should be £8,480, with effect from 13 June, next week. In terms of the motion, it means that the allowance will be £8,480 in a full year and £8,384 in the year ending 31 March 1982.

We also propose that the supplement of £800 available to Members to use for the provision of a pension for their employees should be increased by 6 per cent. to £848 in a full year. At the moment the amount that may be contributed towards the provision of a pension for the employee may not exceed 10 per cent. of his or her salary. The review body was asked to consider whether that was a reasonable limit, but it did not have time to consider the matter in sufficient detail to justify proposing changes in the existing arrangements. For the time being, therefore, I propose to retain the limit, which I believe is a fair one. If the review body were to produce future recommendations in this regard we should of course consider them. I hope that this will reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham (Mr. Moate), who raised the matter with me.

Mr. Roger Moate (Faversham)

I thank my right hon. Friend for his reference to me. Will he make it clear to the House that the 10 per cent. limit is the result of an arbitrary decision by my right hon. Friend or his predecessor, and not a figure that has been established by the House? The motion before us in no way imposes that inner limit.

Mr. Pym

That is correct. It arises as a result of a motion that was an expression of opinion, which enabled the Government to decide what the figure should be. My predecessor and the Government at the time thought that the 10 per cent. limit was fair, and I agree. However, I also agree that there are arguments about the matter. Therefore, I thought it helpful to ask the review body to consider the subject.

This year, the review body made two specific recommendations for improvements in the secretarial allowance, both of which the Government accept and are incorporated in the motion. The first is that supplementary provision, pro rata to the secretarial and research allowance, should, if necessary, be made available where a Member of Parliament continues to pay his secretary or research assistant for a period of absence of more than four weeks. I shall be consulting through the usual channels about the precise rules that should govern the use of the supplementary provision, but I suggest that it should not be available for periods of less than four weeks' or more than six months continuous absence and should be paid only upon production of the appropriate medical evidence. I propose that this new facility should be introduced on 13 June 1981.

The second improvement is that the secretarial allowance should continue to be payable during Dissolution. This is to assist hon. Members of the previous Parliament to undertake such parliamentary duties as may arise up until the time of the general election. But if this extension is not to be the subject of justified criticism by other candidates in the election, it is essential that secretaries should be paid only for work of a strictly parliamentary nature. Any work undertaken by the secretary that is party political in content must be paid for out of party or personal funds. I am sure that the House will see the force of this point and wish that restriction to be strictly upheld.

The review body also suggested that the feasibility of the House supplying and maintaining such standard items of equipment as typewriters, dictation equipment and calculators for the use of Members and their secretaries should be explored. I have reservations about it, and the preliminary consideration suggests to me that some practical problems would arise in adopting a policy of that kind, but it is being looked at.

Mr. Tim Sainsbury (Hove)

In that connection, it seems to some of us that modern developments such as word processors are particularly applicable to much of the correspondence with which hon. Members have to deal. Might it not be possible for that aspect of the matter to be given special attention?

Mr. Pym

I am sure that that matter can be considered, but I think that most hon. Members would wish to formulate their own words in any correspondence in which they engage. I know that my hon. Friend is a technocrat in these matters, and I am sure that his suggestion could be considered.

Mr. Sainsbury

With word processors one can have on file paragraphs appropriate to the work of a number of hon. Members. If somebody writes, for example, about water rates, instead of a secretary having to type out a reply every time—it is a frequent topic of correspondence—the machine can do it automatically.

Mr. Pym

My hon. Friend has struck a source of great controversy and I do not propose to enter into it. I have no doubt that a word processor would improve many of the letters that I write and many of the speeches that I make, but I have reservations about it.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

Would my right hon. Friend indicate to the House, either now or when he replies to the debate, the ratio of total allowances paid, say, in the last 12 months to the total of hon. Members salaries and remuneration?

Mr. Pym

I do not see the relevance of that question, but if we can work out some figure we shall try to help my hon. Friend.

The point about allowances is that they can be drawn only for expenses incurred directly and specifically for parly business, so the amount is not relevant to the consideration of salary. At any rate, that is my view of it. But I shall endeavour to produce a percentage of some sort when I reply to the debate.

The motion seeks the approval of the House to a draft Order in respect of Ministers' salaries. Ministers and other office holders referred to in the order are in a very similar position to that of Members of Parliament. They, too, have had the increases proposed for them by the review body in 1979 implemented in three stages. Like hon. Members, Ministers and office holders—except Cabinet Ministers and the Attorney-General—had the second and third stages increased by 9.6 per cent., Cabinet Ministers and the Attorney-General limited their increases to 5 per cent.

Under the terms of the order approved by Parliament last year, Ministers and office holders will automatically receive their third stage increase, as updated in 1980, with effect from 13 June 1981. The Government are proposing a 6 per cent. increase in the generality of ministerial salaries this year. That will give most Ministers a salary slightly above the levels recommended as appropriate by the review body in 1980, but Cabinet Ministers and the Attorney-General will still be below those levels.

The rates shown in the order for the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor are the rates that may be paid to the holders of these offices and that will apply for pension purposes. However, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said that she and the Lord Chancellor will not draw the full salaries to which they are entitled but will continue to receive the same salary as their Cabinet colleagues.

A special problem arises over the salaries of Ministers of State, Parliamentary Secretaries and other office holders in the House of Lords. In announcing an increase in ministerial salaries last year, the Prime Minister drew attention to the fact that this group did not receive any salary specifically in respect of their parliamentary duties. She told the House that the Government proposed to consider how the arrangements for their remuneration should be revised to take account of that problem. As things stand, the difference in total remuneration received by Ministers in the House of Lords and those in this House is out of proportion to the differences in their duties, and in the Government's opinion the pay of Ministers in the House of Lords is not commensurate with their responsibilities.

To overcome this, we propose to make arrangements for the ministerial salaries of Ministers of State, Parliamentary Secretaries and other office holders in the House of Lords to be increased by £3,500 over and above the general increases that I have described. This addition to their remuneration, in place of a parliamentary salary, is rather less than half the amount of the parliamentary salary payable to Ministers of this House.

The way in which this will be achieved differs slightly for the different groups. In the case of Ministers of State, hon. Members may have noticed that the draft order this year, as in previous years, makes provision for a range of salaries. The Prime Minister proposes to use her discretion under the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 to secure that Ministers of State in the House of Lords are paid at the top of this range, which runs from £19,775 to £23,275, while Ministers of State in the House of Common continue to be paid at the bottom of the range.

In the case of Parliamentary Secretaries, a similar result will be obtained by increasing the maximum salary under the Act to £18,600. Parliamentary Secretaries in the House of Lords will be paid this maximum while those in the House of Commons will get £15,100, which is £3,500 less.

The salaries of all other paid office holders in the House of Lords, except Cabinet Ministers—that is to say, the Lord Advocate, Whips and the Leader of the Opposition in that House—have been set in the draft order at £3,500 above the third stage levels approved last year, increased by 6 per cent. The Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen of Committees will also have their salaries enhanced by the same amount.

Those, then, are the proposals of the Government for this year. For the future, we await with interest the results of the new Select Committee on Members' Salaries. I do not think that the House will expect me to say anything more on that until the report of that Committee has been received.

My predecessor as Leader of the House—my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr. St. John-Stevas)—told the House last year that getting the right rate of salary for Members of Parliament was essentially a question of balance. That applies equally to Members' allowances and ministerial salaries. Some Members may feel that we have been a little generous on certain points. Others will no doubt accuse us of being unnecessarily stingy. But I believe that we have the overall balance about right, and I hope that the House will support our proposals.

It is necessary for the House to attend properly to these important matters of remuneration and allowances of our own membership. It is something we cannot dodge, whatever the Select Committee may recommend. I hope that the decisions that the Government have taken this year, after the most careful consideration and consultation, will be approved by the House.

9.59 am

Mr. Charles R. Morris (Manchester, Openshaw)

Few would dispute the political sensitivities surrounding the question of the pay and allowances of Ministers and hon. Members. I listened carefully to the speech made by the Leader of the House in support of the proposals and I accept the general tenor of his comments, to the effect that the proposals are no more than fair and just.

This debate—like virtually every other debate on this subject in recent years—takes place against a background of press and public exhortation for hon. Members to exercise restraint over their pay, to give a lead and to have regard to the wider perspectives of the interests of the nation as a whole. I would not seek to deny the validity of such exhortations. Equally, I accept that public and political accountability cannot be ignored. But I hope that on some occasion a Minister will take the time to explain the realities and complexities of hon. Members' pay and publicly to acknowledge the restraint and self-denial that has been exercised by both Ministers and hon. Members in the past 16 years.

There was little acknowledgement in the right hon. Gentleman's speech of the restraint and self-denial that has been exercised in recent years. Indeed, he gave us one more instalment in the shabby exercise, initiated in 1979, to persuade hon. Members and the public that justice on pay—recommended by the independent report of the Top Salaries Review Body in 1979—must take second place to Government policy. I use the phrase "shabby exercise" to describe the Government's stance on hon. Members' pay in view of the terms used by the Prime Minister on 30 July 1979.

Hon. Members will recall that the Prime Minister wrote to Lord Boyle, in his capacity as chairman of the review body, as follows: It is our intention to accept and implement the recommendations you make. There was no qualification about the basis on which she invited the review body to proceed with its review. She gave a specific and unambiguous undertaking. The Prime Minister changed her mind. I do not cavil at Prime Ministers changing their minds, but having eaten her words, she still denies hon. Members—in June 1981— the updated salary that was recommended in 1979.

It is no wonder that the review body under the distinguished chairmanship of Lord Plowden, should be moved to make the following comments on page 3 of report No. 17, which is dated May 1981: even when the final instalment of the increases agreed in 1980 is paid in June 1981, our Report No. 15 recommendations will still not have been implemented in full. To do so would produce an overall increase in salary cost of about 5 per cent. over and above the increase of 12 per cent. which is already due to be paid with effect from 13 June 1981 … while the amounts set out in Report No. 15 remain to be fully implemented, and having regard to current economic circumstances, we see no point in putting forward new figures which would add to the existing shortfall. We strongly recommend, however, that the salaries recommended in Report No. 15 should be implemented in full and as soon as possible." We are still awaiting the full, updated implementation of report No. 15.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

The right hon. Gentleman said that the Prime Minister had imposed an injustice on the House. Surely it is for the House to determine, by its vote, the sums that should be paid.

Mr. William Hamilton (Fife, Central)

We did.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

If the right hon. Gentleman believes that the proposition before the House is inadequate, why did he not table amendments to increase the sums involved?

Mr. Morris

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman did not listen to the introduction to my remarks on the recommendations of the Boyle committee. I argued that the Leader of the House had an obligation to explain the realities and complexities of hon. Members' pay. Therefore, I drew on the historical background of that report.

I find it sad and disconcerting that public understanding of this issue has not been helped by the manner in which the proposals were presented by some newspapers after the Government's announcement of their intentions. Rarely have I read such squalid misrepresentations as those published on this subject. Some of the articles were hardly a lesson in objective journalism. I shall quote a few of them. On 16 May, the Daily Mail made the following observation: MPs get the lion's share of pay rises. It described the Government's proposals as "pay provocation."

On 16 May The Scotsman gave a particularly objectionable presentation of the facts under the heading "MP 19%: Doctor 6%". The article continued: The MPs have given themselves by far the most handsome increase, an award amounting to nearly 19 per cent. Our soldiers, who die in Northern Ireland, not spout words about the province, get 10 per cent. As a Member of Parliament, I object to anyone putting that construction on these proposals. I found the Sunday Express of 17 May, which suggested that we were setting an appalling example, wholly questionable.

The editorial in The Sun was particularly offensive. Under the heading "Gravy train", it made the following suggestion: Members of Parliament have an advantage over the rest of us. Presumably, that is a reference to the community at large. It continued: They repeatedly fix their own salaries. And now they appear likely to be generous to themselves. The Government has produced a report giving them a thumping 18 per cent. rise. It describes the Government's proposals as "humbug". Even more unfortunately the editorial concludes: There can be no special gravy train for MPs. That is a gross distortion of the facts on Members' pay. It ignores the restraint that has time and time again been observed in recent years by Members and Ministers on their salaries and remuneration.

Mr. Frank Hooley (Sheffield, Heeley)

I agree with my right hon. Friend about the squalid attitude in certain parts of the press, but does he not agree that it is scarcely better than the humbug of some hon. Members who demand that remuneration of full-time Members be cut, while they are drawing massive remuneration and pretending to do their work here at the same time?

Mr. Morris

I agree with my hon. Friend that an analogy can be drawn to that extent, but the essential difference is that if someone objects in the House he can be answered in the House.

Mr. Alan Clark (Plymouth, Sutton)

The right hon. Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris) used the revealing phrase "the restraint that MPs have shown time and time again." If there were no inflation would not hon. Members' pay remain fixed indefinitely, like other remuneration? If one has to show restraint "time and time again" the continuing deterioration of inflation must to some extent be the responsibility of successive Parliaments. The Opposition cannot divorce themselves entirely from the responsibility for this because, as the right hon. Member rightly says, it has been going on for many years.

Mr. Morris

I know of no hon. Member who seeks to divorce himself or herself from the realities of the problems that arise from inflation. Inflation is a fact of economic life, but our salaries and remuneration must take account of it as does every other salary increase demand. As I read the press reports of these proposals I had the feeling that the editors of the newspapers to which I have referred are in some peculiar way in favour of pay restraint as long as other people's pay is being restrained. I hope that the editors and leader writers to whom I have referred have exercised restraint in their own pay comparable to that accepted in recent years by hon. Members.

Mr. George Cunningham (Islington, South and Finsbury)

Or tell us what the figures are.

Mr. Morris

My hon. Friend suggests that those people would do the House and the nation a service by identifying their salaries. I believe that parliamentary pay should not be so generous as to be an attraction in itself, nor so low as to discourage able aspirants from seeking membership. It should be sufficient to enable an hon. Member to devote all his time to parly duties. Hon. Members are entitled to fair and reasonable remuneration. I was pleased to note the emphasis which the Leader of the House placed on the current deliberations in the Select Committee about the linkage of hon. Members' pay with the appropriate Civil Service grade. I hope that those deliberations will be brought to a speedy conclusion.

I have one or two comments to make about allowances generally. Will the Leader of the House comment on paragraph 13 of the Plowden report, No. 17? The Leader of the House referred to that paragraph when he commented on the payment for temporary assistance when an hon. Member's secretary or research assistant cannot work through illness. He generously suggested that the Government are sympathetic to such a suggestion. Another problem which has been drawn to my attention is the substitution of a secretary who might be ill for some time. Will he give his attention to this question, bearing in mind the fact that a medical certificate would be required to support the illness?

The Leader of the House commented on paragraph 15, which deals with office equipment. I recognise that the provision, purchase and maintenance of office equipment arouses strong feelings and arguments on both sides.

The Leader of the House suggested that he was not wholly sympathetic to that idea, but I hope that his views will not be unduly influenced by the views that I understand have been expressed by Officers of the House in relation to the additional staffing needed to implement that proposal. I look forward to the suggestion in the final two lines of the paragraph that a feasibility study should be undertaken.

Paragraph 17 deals with travel expenses of hon. Members. One additional matter has been put to me in relation to travel expenses for hon. Members with young children. At present a provincial Member has occasional travel facilities to enable him to bring his wife to London. If he brings his children in his private car the cost is met by the car allowance. If he wishes to bring the children by train there is no provision for dealing with such expenditure. I hope that, in any further consideration, the Plowden Committee will consider that.

I support the present proposals.

10.17 am

Mr. Edward du Cann (Taunton)

At the beginning of this Parliament the Government gave an undertaking that matters would proceed in a particular way. That was after much argument and discussion—all of it embarrassing and, in my view, unnecessary. That undertaking was given and it has been honoured ever since.

My right hon. Friend, as Leader of the House, is responsible for the tabling of these motions exactly in accordance with the undertakings given. It is right that the House should pay tribute to him and thank him for his work. I am sure that the House was grateful, too, for the speech that he made, which, like the speech of the right hon. Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris), attempted to put the subject into context. However, I disagree with him in one respect. He said, as he was bound to say, that he believes that the Government have the balance about right and that the quantum of remuneration for Members of Parliament is right at present. I do not believe that to be so.

Members of Parliament, in spite of all the recommendations and travail, are very much underpaid. The facilities that are available to us are inadequate still for all the great improvements that have been made in recent years to enable us to discharge our functions properly. Last, but by no means least, I have no doubt that Ministers are substantially underpaid.

The right hon. Member for Openshaw, in saying that this was a sensitive subject and pointing out the way in which it had been so much misrepresented lately, did the House a service. If genuine misunderstandings arise—and they do—they arise from the way in which we have dealt with these matters in the past. That is what is wrong, and some of us will continue to seek to change that system.

I sympathise with the spirit of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) and others. They are right to express concern about the level of hon. Members' remuneration and the proposed increases. As the right hon. Member for Openshaw said and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House implied, we have a special responsibility in dealing with these matters. We are advocate and judge in our own case. The system should not and need not have developed in that way, but it has done so and there is inevitably some embarrassment.

We also have a duty to set an example of moderation and good sense, and this is a moment of particular difficulty because of the disagreement between the Government and our splendid Civil Service, which serves the nation so well and honourably, and because many workers in the private sector have lost their jobs some are taking wage increases that are much lower than the rate of inflation and some have had no increase in pay. It is also a difficult moment because the effects of the economic recession are being felt by the population at large which is also having to bear the burdens of inflation, taxation, rates and other impositions.

But it is always a difficult moment; it always has been and it always will be. There will always be misunderstandings and misrepresentations, some casual and some deliberate, but, in this matter as in others, that is no reason for not doing what is right in the general interest.

The House and the nation must decide that Ministers and Members should be properly paid—that is to say, fairly paid—at all times. The public expect much from their public servants, not least from Ministers and leading figures in the Opposition. They have a duty in return to ensure that the conditions under which we operate are such that we can and will do the jobs with which they have been generous enough to entrust us, and that has not been the case in relation to pay for many years.

I was struck by a remark of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that exactly mirrored the truth, as his utterances always do. Recalling the history of the matter he said that Governments had not been able to agree in the past because the proposed increases were too large. That is an extraordinary doctrine. Hon. Members have been behind for so long that no Government have had the courage to bring them up to a proper level, and the embarrassment has continued and been compounded over the years. But it is an extraordinary doctrine and an extraordinary way of handling our affairs.

We have been behind in comparison with other nations, as was shown in an interesting paper published in The House Magazine recently. Representatives in Belgium receive £21,000 a year and those in Denmark receive about the same as we do. In the Federal Republic of Germany, Representatives receive more than £21,000 a year and in France they are paid £27,000. Those in Italy and Luxembourg receive much the same as we are about to receive, but Netherlands' Representatives are paid more than £20,000 a year. Only Representatives in the Republic of Ireland receive markedly less than we get.

Not only are we well behind the other nations in Europe; we are behind in the United Kingdom context. I ought to put on record how the situation has developed since we agreed that we could not bring ourselves to decide these matters for ourselves and would therefore refer them to the Boyle committee.

Our recommended salary in June 1975 was £8,000, but the actual salary was more than 25 per cent. less, at £5,750. In the previous three and a half years industrial wages had increased by 80 per cent. and Members' salaries by 28 per cent. In the seven and three-quarter years before that industrial wages had risen by 76½ per cent. and Members' salaries by 38½ per cent. The pattern has been the same in recent years.

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said—and it needs to be underlined—the large increases in pay that Members and Ministers appear to be getting this year are a mere consequence of the staging of previous recommendations made by the Boyle committee.

In 1979 the twelfth report of the Top Salaries Review Body recommended an increase in our pay to £12,000. The Government did not agree to that, but I do not remember my constituents giving me credit for that piece of self-denial. I do not remember leading articles in newspapers saying that hon. Members were setting a splendid example. Instead, it was decreed that the increase should be paid in three stages. In 1980 the review body recommended that the third stage should be increased by 14.6 per cent. It was not; lesser sums were decreed by the Government and agreed by the House. I do not remember any leading articles saying that that was a splendid piece of self-sacrifice and a marvellous example to the nation.

In the seventeenth report of the review body this year no new rates were recommended. Instead, it was recommended that at least the previous reports should be implemented. The House should note the implication of that. It is that the review body thought it no longer worthwhile to make recommendations, because the House and the Government would ignore them. A further implication was that hon. Members had fallen still further behind.

The proposed figure of £13,950 is a little above the rate of £13,750 that the review body thought was appropriate a year ago. The supposed increase of 18.7 per cent. this year needs to be set against the fact that hon. Members have not had their salaries brought fully up to date since 1972, and the position of Ministers is even worse.

It is not inappropriate to make a short comparison with the position of the Civil Service. With the exception of the top grades, which also come under the recommendations of the Top Salaries Review Body, the position of all non-industrial civil servants was brought fully up to date in the 1980 review.

It is sometimes suggested that our remuneration should be linked to that of assistant secretaries. The mid-level of remuneration for an assistant secretary is £18,000 a year. We are substantially behind the comparison that most people have thought suitable for us over the years.

My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House gave a remarkable answer recently to my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Trotter). My hon. Friend asked: what has been the total sum expressed in current cash terms adjusted for inflation of which the pay of an hon. Member from February 1974 to date has been less than the total salary recommended by the Boyle committee over this period. My hon. Friend's answer was: Fifteen thousand one hundred and fifty-nine pounds."—[Official Report, 13 April 1981; Vol. 3, c. 1.] In plain English, that is the sum of money that each Member of Parliament has denied himself over the years. That figure should be far more widely known than it currently is. The ridiculousness of the present situation is demonstrated by the fact that this is, I think, the third debate on this subject in the present Parliament. I do not suppose that I shall be the only hon. Member to reflect that it seems extraordinary to spend a whole day on this matter at a time of grave economic crisis, when we are in the midst of a currency crisis and when there are so many aspects of our very worrying economic scene that we ought to be discussing.

We are always short of time. During the past three days we have had a guillotine imposed on our discussion of an important matter because we are short of time. Why do we have to debate this matter yet again? It is because of our failure to face up to what we needed to do at the beginning of this Parliament, just as we failed to face up to it at the beginning of the last Parliament?

My right hon. Friend is always a willing listener and is most sympathetic to the aspirations of the House. I am sure that he understands as well as anybody what needs to be done. I most strongly urge him to consider the views that the Parliamenary Labour Party and the 1922 Committee have put so consistently, that in these matters we should make decisions at the beginning of a Parliament and let them stand for the whole of that Parliament. Let us take the matter out of the cockpit of continuous debate, which is so tedious, tiresome and undignified for all of us.

Mr. Alan Clark

Surely that time to debate this matter is not at the beginning but at the end of a Parliament.

Mr. du Cann

I do not disagree with my hon. Friend. By all means let the decision be made at the end of a Parliament, or let what is to be done be known and let the new Parliament take the decision. Clearly, discussion and consideration would need to take place at the end of a Parliament. I agree with my hon. Friend on that. The precise time when legislative effect is given does not seem to me to matter very much, provided that it is done as from the beginning of a new Parliament.

I wish to refer briefly to the amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) and others. It is not easy for me to say this to the hon. Gentleman, as I dare say that he and I disagree violently about more matters than we shall ever agree about. Nevertheless, I appreciate the sincerity of what he seeks to propose, namely, the hon. Members should spend all their time on work in the House. I believe, however, that if we ever agreed to that the House would be very much the poorer for it. I have no doubt that the outside experience that hon. Members bring to their work here is of incalculable value, although it is perhaps not easy to define in specific terms. The day on which all of us are wholly dependent upon the Parliamentary salary for our existence, Parliament will be very much the poorer. The day when each of us becomes no more than a party forictionnaire, independence will substantially decrease.

I hope with all my heart that there will always be a substantial majority on both sides of the House to ensure that the professional politician does not have a dominant place in the House of Commons. On the subject of the jealousies—and that is the word to use—that money always excites because Mr. A earns a living doing a particular thing outside and Mr. B does not, I merely comment that it is quite easy for Members of Parliament not to draw salaries and allowances if they do not so wish. That is a private matter for them, and I would much prefer to trust their discretion, good sense and integrity than to impose compulsions.

For the rest, my main theme remains the same. Members of Parliament have consistently undervalued themselves for a long time. Ministers and Members of Parliament are neither so well paid nor so well provided with facilities as they should be. Therefore, the struggle—for that it is what it has been in recent years—to achieve improvements will and should continue.

In the meantime, my right hon. Friend has honoured the Government's undertaking. I therefore end as I began by thanking and warmly congratulating him in that regard.

10.35 am

Mr. Alfred Dubs (Battersea, South)

I disagreed with the penultimate comment of the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) when he said that if we were all full-time Members of Parliament and relied totally upon parliamentary salaries, that would be so much the worse for the House. I suggest that it would be a great deal better for our constituents. My constituents do not suggest to me, as a full-time Member of Parliament, that I should become part-time and become good at something else as well. Our constituents' attitude is that they make demands upon us and wish that we had more time to meet those demands. They welcome the fact that an increasing number of Members of Parliament believe that the needs of their constituents are such that they should devote themselves full time to them.

Mr. Cryer

Does my hon. Friend accept that the evidence is contrary to the claims and assertions of the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann)? The right hon. Gentleman suggested that lack of an independent outside income would lead to hon. Members becoming party fonctionnaires. The Conservative Party, which is dominated by outside interests, loyally goes into the Lobbies time after time. I do not think that anyone could apply that criticism to the Labour Party—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"]—which, at the very least, demonstrates that it has a fair measure of internal argument from time to time.

Mr. Dubs

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. Conservative Members may laugh, but can they really maintain that they are seen to be politically impartial and not influenced by the money that they may earn from sources other than their salaries as Members of Parliament? If one has another source of income, is it easy to demonstrate to one's constituents that one is not even a little influenced now and again by the interests that provide that other source of income?

Mr. Sainsbury

The hon. Gentleman's argument seems to imply that union sponsorship would be subject to the same criticism.

Mr. Dubs

No, it would not, for the obvious reason that union sponsorship goes to the constituency party and not into the pocket of the individual Member of Parliament. I am talking about the financial benefit that may be derived by an individual Member of Parliament and the fact that constituents cannot help but suspect that he might be influenced by the source of his money.

My main point, however, is that in considering Members' pay and allowances I fear that most of our constituents think that we are just plain daft because of the way in which we approach this matter. They put it to me that if we cannot sort out our own affairs in a better way, how can we be expected to run the country? We make idiots of ourselves year after year by having these tortured and agonising debates. To that extent I agree with the right hon. Member for Taunton. We expose all this to public view because we cannot sensibly make the decisions that we ought to make. I thought that we were silly about this before I was elected to be a Member of Parliament a couple of years ago, and now I am convinced that we are even sillier, because of the way in which we approach this matter year after year.

Having said that, I add that I find it invidious to have to vote on my own pay. The sooner that we get rid of this responsibility, and the sooner we can index-link and link our pay, as I hope that the Select Committee considering the matter will propose, the better it will be for us. We put our pay out to some kind of arbitration, to the Boyle committee, but we did not accept the results. I wish that a number of trade unionists were involved in the body that considers our pay, instead of merely the people now on the Plowden committee. If Mr. Clive Jenkins of ASTMS were negotiating our pay for us we would all be much better off and our case would be put forward in a much better way than is the case now.

I believe that there are two issues that are more important than the pay that goes into our pockets. The first is what one might call severance pay when Members of Parliament cease to be Members, and the second is the allowance that we get for support services to enable us to do our jobs properly.

It is my sad conclusion that because some Members of Parliament below pensionable age might find themselves in serious financial difficulties on ceasing to be Members, a number are here because they cannot afford to leave. I believe that at every general election a number stand again because they cannot face the financial consequences of having no source of income and no prospects of a job, and that even between general elections there might be a number who might feel that, for reasons of health, or for any other reasons, they would quit if they could afford to do so.

Quite apart from the personal distress that that must cause the individuals concerned, I believe that it is unhealthy for British politics that there should be people here who just cannot afford not to be here.

I should have thought that it would be better for politics in Britain if we could alter the arrangements so that Members would have, as it were, a pension for life on ceasing to be Members, even if we then had to live with the accusation that some people served as Members of Parliament for only a few years in order to have, as the newspapers would put it, a meal ticket for the rest of their days. I think that that would be a lesser evil and be less damaging to politics in Britain than the present situation, when a number of Members of Parliament do not want to be here but are forced to stay for financial reasons.

Mr. Onslow

To enable the House to evaluate the hon. Gentleman's proposal, it might be better if he put a figure on it. What sort of pension for life is he suggesting? How would it be earned? Would it be based on length of service here, or on simple service during one Parliament?

Mr. Dubs

I do not want to go into details implicit in the hon. Gentleman's question, because the matter is complicated. There are a number of ways in which it could be done. I have not come here with any such proposals. Had I done so I should have tabled an amendment. It is not an easy matter to decide. It could be that we would give an ex-MP a proportion of his parliamentary salary to such people not earning any equivalent sum from elsewhere.

That could be worked out. What I am saying is that it is damaging to politics that there are at least a number of MPs who are faced with this difficulty.

My main point concerns the support services for Members. I welcome the two decisions announced by the Leader of the House: first that when Members' secretaries fall ill, provision will be made for Members to have temporary secretarial assistance during that period; and, secondly, that there will be secretarial support during periods when the House is dissolved. Nevertheless, it has been my impression, since first becoming a Member, that our back-up services are poor. When I have made that point to Members of longer standing they have said "Yes, of course you are right, but it was much worse when we first came here". That is the argument that all long-service Members seem to want to use.

If one compares our support services with those of elected representatives in other countries, one finds that ours are bad. In the United States, a Member of the House of Representatives has a staff of 18. I understand that in France a Member of the Assembly has a staff of two. I understand that even in South Korea—hardly a haven for democratic government—Members of the Assembly also have a staff of two.

I cannot understand why this problem was not resolved years ago. I have the smallest suspicion that it suits the Front Benches—whichever major party is in Government—that Back Benchers should be kept in their place, beaten down by the amount of work they have to do, because if we had better support services we could be more active on the political issues in which we are elected to take part.

I am not for one moment criticising the support that we receive from the Library and the Research Department. That is excellent, but it is limited by the number of staff. It is my contention that every Member should have the backing of one full-time secretary and one full-time research assistant. At present, under our secretarial, research and office expense allowance, I think that there is an imputed sum of about £1,250 for research assistance. Frankly, I find it very difficult to know how such a sum can be used effectively. I have a research assistant who comes in on one day a week, but that is a difficult and unsatisfactory arrangement.

It is because of the difficulties that I have had with that arrangement that I have put forward my amendments. They keep within the spirit of the 6 per cent. cash limit, not because I accept that limit, but because I hope that Conservative Members will be sympathetic to my amendments and will support them. I regret that my amendments are so complicated, but that is the difficulty when one is dealing not with legislation, but simply with a motion such as the one before us. I should have liked to spell my case out in even more detail, but that would have resulted in even more amendments.

I should like to explain simply that I am seeking to do. First, I seek to add a research assistant to the staff of every MP who wishes to have support. Secondly, I am suggesting that any Members who avail themselves of this opportunity would have that research assistant or assistants paid through the Fees Office. I seek that because it is proper that when we increase the amount of money for our support, that should be accounted for satisfactorily.

For support for that proposition I look to the first report from the Select Committee on Assistance to Private Members, published in May 1975. Paragraph 14 says: We are all convinced that it is incumbent upon the House to set standards of accountability in the use of public funds that are above any possible public criticism. We think that arrangements which may have been sufficient when allowances were comparatively low will not be sufficient if the allowances are substantially increased. That, in a nutshell, is why I am suggesting that any additional amount of money made available to us should come through the Fees Office.

There is some support for that—a little link, perhaps—in report No. 17 from the Top Salaries Review Body. Paragraph 16 of that report, under the broad heading of "Office equipment", says: This and a number of other problems mentioned in this report would be greatly eased by the introduction of central employment of secretaries which we recommended in Report No. 13. I appreciate that being paid through the Fees Office is not the same as central employment, but really what one is talking about is proper accounting for sums made available. I wish that all moneys paid to any staff went through the Fees Office. I see my proposal as something of a compromise, in the hope that it will find favour with hon. Members.

The third point implicit in my amendments is that flexibility between different heads of expenditure will still be retained and still be at the discretion of the individual Member of Parliament to allocate as between office expenses, secretarial expenses and research assistance. I put that forward because in the past the House has argued that individual Members of Parliament should have this flexibility. It does not contradict my point that money for resarch assistance should come through the Fees Office. What I am saying is that if a Member wishes to avail himself of such extra money, it should be paid through the Fees Office.

If a Member wished to pay a research assistant more than the sum indicated, and therefore less to his secretary, the element described in the amendment would have to come through the Fees Office. I appreciate that it is complicated and that it may not sound 100 per cent. logical, but if Members accept that in the past the House has urged flexibility between expenditure heads, they will appreciate that that is what I am putting forward.

Mr. Moate

I understand the point about flexibility. The amendment, as framed, would allow such flexibility, but, in effect, it would mean that in a full year £14,000 would be available to a Member and he could, if he wished, pay the whole of it to a secretary. There is nothing to prevent his paying all that money to one person—either secretary or research assistant. That would perpetuate the invidious situation, which often arises, of having a fairly large sum of money and not knowing how much should be made available to a secretary or to some other employee.

Mr. Dubs

I concede the point made by the hon. Gentleman. If I had felt that I could impose the burden of an even greater number of amendments on the House, I should have suggested reservations, such as setting a maximum limit on the amount to be paid to each individual. That is not a serious criticsm, because, if the amendments are accepted, the Leader of the House will presumably take note of them and come back with more specific proposals. That is how the House has dealt with such matters in the past. There is nothing wrong with the Leader of the House coming back with fuller and more specific proposals than it is sensible for a Back Bencher to encompass, even with as long a series of amendments as I have tabled.

I hope that the House will heed my suggestion. I am not asking the House to indulge in a vast increase of expenditure that will be seen to be extravagant. It is a modest proposal that a Member of Parliament should have enough money to pay for a typewriter, dictating equipment, a secretary and research assistant. It is the practice in most countries that have elected assemblies. I do not see why we should deny ourselves the necessary facilities to carry out our work for our constituents.

10.52 am

Mr. John Bruce-Gardyne (Knutsford)

I do not support the amendments to which the hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) has been speaking. I question whether the substantial influx of so-called research assistants, which has already occurred, has rebounded vastly to the benefit of the House or of the public. It has certainly generated a great deal of extra business on the Order Paper by way of written questions at substantial cost to the taxpayer.

I cannot see the evidence to support the argument that Back Benchers would be better able to perform their role if they were equipped with research assistants and the like. I am inclined to plead the example of the right hon. Member for Down, South (Mr. Powell) who, whatever views one may have of his opinions, undoubtedly makes a massive contribution to the work of the House, both upstairs and downstairs, and who, so far as I know, has no assistance of any kind. The case has not been made out, and I do not support the amendments.

That apart, I did not find myself in agreement with many of the comments made by the hon. Member for Battersea, South. I was least in agreement with him when he, in turn, was in disagreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann).

There are two aspects of what my right hon. Friend said with which I agree. The first was his reference to the payment of Ministers. I welcome motion No. 4. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton that Ministers of the Crown are not paid at a rate which ensures—this seems to be the crucial issue—that, in making their choice for ministerial appointments, the Government have a free hand and can attract whatever talents they need. Therefore, the argument for better financial treatment of Ministers is sound.

I take a very different view of Back Benchers. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton that Back Benchers should be encouraged to have outside employment. Indeed, I go rather further than my right hon. Friend in that respect. I believe that as far as possible, all Back Benchers should have outside employment, for the reasons that he expressed. However, there is another consideration that he did not mention.

The House already grossly overloads its activities. I do not believe that the public benefit from the vast amount of legislation, that we constantly churn out, like a sausage machine. If the House sat and legislated less, we should have a more satisfied electorate than we have today. That is an additional reason why Back Benchers should have outside employment.

If we were to go to a system of full-time Members of Parliament—to which I should be very much opposed—we should need fewer Members. There is no conceivable argument for having 635 full-time Members of Parliment. If we were to be really full-time, there would be no justification for having more than 300 Members. That would be a major reform and would go far beyond the scope of the motions that we are discussing.

Mr. Onslow

My hon. Friend has overlooked one possible advantage. If the number of Members remained the same, the choice of potential Ministers would be as wide as it is now. If the number were to be drastically reduced, the choice for Ministers of ability would correspondingly diminish.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

I see the strength in that proposition, although I am not totally convinced by it. We should not exaggerate the range of choice offered by having 635 Members rather than 300 to choose from. However, I must not progress too far down that road, because it is rather wide of the motions.

I can see three good points in the proposals for the payment of Members of Parliament. First, this year, thank goodness, there is no reference to indexation or analoguing. I profoundly disagree with the hon. Member for Battersea, South on that subject. It is utterly indefensible for Members of Parliament, who must accept a considerable burden of responsibility for the scary escalation of inflation which has been inflicted on this country over many years, to seek to insulate themselves from the consequences of that performance. I have always been violently opposed to any suggestion of indexation or analoguing of our salaries for that reason. I find myself in disagreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr. St. John-Stevas) in this respect, and I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has not proceeded down that road in relation to these motions.

The second reason why I can see some arguments for the proposition of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is that, as he pointed out, we are now putting our pension arrangements and our salary arrangements on an equal footing, and it is highly undesirable that we should devise our pension arrangements on the basis of a notional salary that we were not prepared to pay ourselves. I am glad that we have eliminated that disparity.

The third point in favour of what my right hon. Friend proposes is that, so far as I can judge—he will no doubt correct me if I am wrong—if the House accepted his proposals we should be tilting the ratio between our pay and our allowances in favour of pay and against allowances to some extent. My right hon. Friend said that he could not see the relevance to the matters before the House of my query about that ratio. Let me explain what I feel the relevance to be.

I accept my right hon. Friend's point that allowances are related to expenditures that hon. Members incur under certain stated headings in the course of their duties, and are therefore deemed to be an ineluctable consequence of the job that we are supposed to do, although I am not clear about the logic, if that is so, of saying that the increase in the allowances should be related not to whatever evidence there may be of the increase in the cost that we incur in our work but to what the Government deem to be an appropriate cash limit for the current year. That proposition does not logically stand up.

However, my important point is that it is extremely dangerous that we should see, as we did throughout the 1970s, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) suggested in his intervention, more and more of the total reimbursement for Members of Parliament received in the form of tax-free allowances. That has nothing to do with whether we can justify the claims that we can make upon these allowances, as we must be expected to do.

The fact is that we have to determine the taxes that the nation shall pay. For that unique reason it is most undesirable that we should be moving more and more to having a higher and higher proportion of our total reimbursement in the form of tax-free allowances. If I am right, I welcome the move to tilt the balance back in the opposite direction as a result of my right hon. Friend's proposals.

Mr. Sainsbury

Has my hon. Friend considered the implications for secretaries, research assistants and other people who work for hon. Members if we do not provide allowances sufficient to give them a reasonable salary? The temptation for hon. Members not to pay a reasonable salary, because they received a lump sum from which they had to pay their secretaries and others, would perhaps be even stronger than it is now.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

I would argue that a reasonable salary is what is required to attract the secretarial assistance of the calibre that hon. Members need. We are a long way from threatening ourselves with the prospect that the allowances will be inadequate to attract secretaries of the calibre we need.

I take the point that it is a question for debate whether one employs a research assistant and the balance that one strikes. In general, I believe that there is no reason why one should he unable to attract secretaries of an adequate calibre.

Having said all that, I do not agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton or the right hon. Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris) that we can expect the electorate at large to take a more adult view—or however it may be described—of the proposed arrangements. There is no getting away from the fact—it is no good pretending that there is—that what is proposed in the motions is an 18½ per cent. increase in the pay of hon. Members, and it is bound to be interpreted in the country as such. I do not see that we can possibly avoid that interpretation. That is why some of my hon. Friends and I have tabled our amendment, which is designed to permit the so-called staging but to knock off the 6 per cent. addition that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has proposed.

Dr. Brian Mawhinney (Peterborough)

I have listened carefully to my hon. Friend's argument, but I am slightly confused. The burden of the amendment and of what he has just said is that 18 per cent. is unacceptable to the community and that therefore the increase should be less. But my hon. Friend has just argued that allowances go to hon. Members tax-free and that if we were being straightforward we should put all the money in a salary to hon. Members, who would then disburse it to those who were helping them.

I have done a rough calculation. I may be £1,000 or £2,000 out, but, on the basis of the figures proposed by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, I estimate that the commensurate salary for a Member of Parliament would be about £27,000.

Mr. Michael Shaw (Scarborough)

Not enough.

Dr. Mawhinney

Therefore, it is difficult to see the strength of the amendment to reduce what is proposed because 18 per cent. is too much, following immediately after an argument whose logical conclusion is that we should be paying ourselves £27,000 a year.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

My hon. Friend's "logical conclusion" from my remarks about allowances does not follow. I was not saying that the allowances should be eliminated and completely incorporated in the salary. What I was saying was that the tendency that emerged in the 1970s for a higher and higher proportion of the total reimbursement of Members of Parliament to take the shape of tax-free allowances was undesirable for an assembly that has to determine the taxes that everyone has to pay. I should not draw from that the conclusion that my hon. Friend sought to draw, nor do I think that it follows from this argument.

However, I do not suggest that there is any immutable perfection to our amendment. One can argue—it is for the House to decide—precisely what increment is appropriate or inappropriate at this time. I believe that what is bound to be interpreted as an 18½ per cent. increase is not good sense at this time.

Mr. George Cunningham

Did I understand the hon. Gentleman correctly just now when he said that the purpose of his amendment was to secure the continuation of the intended arrangements for the coming year without the 6 per cent. addition? If that was his intention, why did he table the amendment at all? Last July and a few months ago we passed the necessary motions to continue the arrangement for the year just beginning. Therefore, all the hon. Gentleman needed to do was to vote against the Government's motion at the end of the day. Therefore, with respect to him, he has displayed procedural incompetence of a nature which, if applied to the passing of legislation, statutory instruments and so on, might suggest that his amateur way of approaching the business of the House had some faults.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

The purpose of our amendment is perfectly clear. Even if the effect materialised which the hon. Gentleman concludes would occur if the Government's proposal were voted down, my proposition is that our amendment is designed to highlight a suggestion which might be open to argument and debate, and should be. If the hon. Gentleman believes that every amendment—even an amendment tabled by the official Opposition, if there is such a body nowadays—is watertight on every occasion, his experience of the House differs profoundly from my own.

Mr. Cunningham

That is exactly what is wrong with the House. Right hon. and hon. Members on the Back Benches and, indeed, Oppositions approach the business of passing legislation in that amateur and incompetent fashion. The House will never exercise its powers over the Government unless right hon. and hon. Members do it more professionally and competently than the right hon. Gentleman has done on this occasion.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

If the hon. Gentleman really believes that we should have professional, competent and beautifully drafted legislation as a result of having 100 per cent. full-time Members, my answer is that I know that we would have a great deal more of it but that it would not be any more competently drafted, and I am certain that the impact on the nation would be worse than it is at present.

Mr. Onslow

I realise that the great lather into which the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) has worked himself has so filled the Chamber that my hon. Friend has not had a chance to examine what is being said. However, the fact is that the Government's motion has two parts to it. We disagree with one part. The only way in which we can achieve our purpose effectively is to seek to amend that part—not to vote down the whole motion. The hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury has made a rhubarb of his intervention.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

My hon. Friend is correct. I made it clear that I agreed with some of the propositions advanced by my right hon. Friend. It is this specific proposition, however, which concerns me.

It may be said and could be argued by my right hon. Friends that they have to make a judgment about what is likely to prove acceptable to the House of Commons as a whole and that if the Government had decided to put before the House a proposition such as the one that my hon. Friends and I are advancing, the House might have been inclined to overrule them.

In a matter of this kind, the judgment must rest with the House. That is why I disagree so profoundly with the right hon. Member for Openshaw when he talks about the Government dictating these matters. It is for the House to make decisions. There is nothing remotely wrong or demeaning in the Government putting a proposition before the House and then finding that the House decides otherwise. The responsibility for these matters must rest with the House as a whole and the way that right hon. and hon. Members cast their votes. I do not believe that there is any way in which we can escape that responsibility. We would be better advised not to persist in trying to do so.

11.15 am

Mr. Bob Cryer (Keighley)

I have this much in common with the hon. Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne): of course people outside will view this proposal as an 18 per cent. increase, and the Civil Service will take that view, too.

Very properly, the Leader of the House explained the divisions of the increase—the historic increases which have been staged, together with a 6 per cent. increase. The Civil Service unions would very much like a similar opportunity to put their case to an arbitrator and would accept the decision of that arbitrator, just as the Leader of the House has put his case to the judgment of Members of Parliament.

Members of the Civil Service who are on strike feel very keenly that they are being denied that opportunity by the arbitrary fiat of the Government in refusing to allow their case to go to arbitration, and they feel enraged that the man with whom they are dealing on behalf of the Government has received an increase of £5,000, which is more than some civil servants earn in a working year.

Having put that in its context, it is worth emphasising that the lengthy explanation which the Leader of the House felt it necessary to make to justify this increase is exactly the claim that the civil servants are making and why there is so much bitterness about the Government's decision and why they feel that it ought to go to arbitration. I hope that the Leader of the House will take that to heart.

I have heard a number of comments about the proposed £13,950. On these occasions the air is rich with a vein of self-sacrifice in which successive hon. Members say how noble we have all been in restraining ourselves. However, the reality is that outside the House—in my constituency and, I suspect, in the constituencies of most hon. Members—a large proportion of the population receive wages and salaries which are far and away below the proposed £13,950. The sum is massively above average industrial earnings.

Mr. Alan Clark

So it should be.

Mr. Cryer

The hon. Gentleman says "So it should be". I am not sure that there is all that much justification, but there is an argument that Members of Parliament should be exempt from financial temptation, for example, because we have important decisions to make which affect every other person in the country. There is that argument, just as there is an argument about judges, for instance. But the notion that somehow we are subject to enormous self-sacrifice and restraint will go down with the population at large like a lead balloon because, to say the least, the proposed sum is adequate.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris) referred to a number of newspaper editorials and the fact that when The Sun, for instance, under the recently knighted Sir Larry Lamb—knighted for services to Conservative Party Central Office, although I understand that he has been sent on leave recently because the circulation of The Sun is sinking rapidly—makes an editorial comment it is careful not to refer to the salary which its editor receives, because the comment would then be exposed for the hypocrisy that it is. I have little doubt that the editors of our daily newspapers receive far more than £13,950 a year.

I told Mr. Speaker how disappointed I was that the amendment that I and 14 other hon. Members had tabled was not called. I am sure that that was an oversight, but it is keenly disappointing, since more hon. Members put their names to it than to any other amendment.

With Members of Parliament being paid £13,950, the public will expect them to do the job full time. With 2.5 million people unemployed, some workers still moonlight by doing other jobs. They are the subject of criticism. They are a tiny minority, however. Most people are pleased to hold down one full-time job, because 2.5 million to 3 million people are denied that opportunity. The least that hon. Members can do is to concentrate all their efforts on the job that the public pays them to do as Members of Parliament.

We expect Ministers to do that. It is true that we pay them a great deal more, although the view that they are worth a greater sum is not always shared by the public. The public feel that if Ministers' salaries were commensurate with the damage that they are doing to the economy they would have money taken away from them. However, Ministers are not allowed to do work in addition to their Government work. They have to operate on a full-time basis, and during their term of office they have to rid themselves of any financial involvement in outside business, other than in family firms in which they have had a shareholding, for a period of time.

That significant limitation is rightly and properly imposed on Ministers to free them from outside influences when they are making decisions. In many cases, but not all, Ministers bring their decisions to the House for discussion and approval by Members of Parliament. That puts us on a par with Ministers, because we have to decide whether their judgment is correct. Ought we not, therefore, to be required, on the same basis, to be free from outside influence when we exercise our judgment?

The right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) said that Parliament would be a dreadful place if all hon. Members were full time. He said that outside experience was necessary and brought a richness to the place. The experience that is apparently used to enrich this place, however, is always the experience of the elite decision-makers which brings rich and handsome rewards. I have never heard it suggested that to bring the richness and diversity of life to Parliament hon. Members should do engineering in the mornings. I have not heard it suggested that to bring the full richness and diversity of experience in the coal mines they should spend their mornings down a pit. It is always said they they should bring the richness of the board-room, of Lloyd's and of the Stock Exchange—the centres of monetary aggrandisement. That is the basis of the richness and experience. "Richness" is a suitable word, because its basis is the financial well-being of those who are making this claim.

The hon. Members who have tabled the amendment to reduce Members' salaries have some effrontery in so doing. The hon. Member for Knutsford did not engage the House in any discussion of how, because he is an employee of the Daily Telegraph Ltd, he is better able than most to accept a reduction of £800. I have no doubt that The Daily Telegraph pays him handsomely for his contributions, although why it should remains a mystery to many people. He is also a consultant to Northern Engineering Industries, something that he presumably does not do out of charity.

The hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) has three directorships. The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Cockeram) has two directorships and a parliamentary advisership. The hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir W. Clark) has five directorships and a consultancy. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. Clark) has two farms and a castle in Kent. He is not exactly, one imagines, close to the poverty line. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Mr. Beaumont-Dark) has two directorships and is a stock broker. One imagines that with 12 directorships, two farms, a castle and sundry adviserships between them they are well insulated from the vagaries of alterations in parliamentary salaries, but they should make that clear when they are proposing that other hon. Members who may not enjoy that insulation should take a reduction in pay of £800.

I want to emphasise the question of full-time membership in relation to the point made by the right hon. Member for Taunton about party functionaries. He suggested that without this rich diversity of experience in stockbroking, membership of Lloyd's and directorships of various companies, which while bringing a wealth of experience to Parliament also brings wealth to the defenders of the system, Parliament would be the poorer. It is true that those individual Members would be the poorer, and I look forward eagerly to their volunteering for more mundane work of a manual nature so that, for the first time in their lives, they can bring a new rich experience and comment to Parliament.

Is it true that full-time membership would reduce everyone to being drudging party hacks, in which circumstance the raised eyebrow of some party Whip would send a jellylike feeling into the backbone of a Member of Parliament because he could see his future political career curtailed? There is an element of that, but it springs not from party memebership, but from the patronage of Prime Ministers. Nobody has explained that this is an element in the invidious relationships which may however, because everyone knows that those Members who examine their career profiles with interest, when they see the Prime Minister pass by eagerly gather round to offer some suitable word and, they hope, get a word of encouragement. I have heard no criticism of that here——

Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)

It is called grovelling.

Mr. Cryer

As usual, my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) has given a neat summary of the position. We in the Labour Party have decided to elect our Leader on a wider basis than hitherto. When Labour is in Government we should like the Cabinet to be elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party to put the issue on a more democratic basis.

The reality is that the Conservative Party is overwhelmingly dominated by people with outside interests. There are one or two such people in the Labour Party, and I criticise any of my hon. Friends who come into that category, but Labour Members are overwhelmingly full-time Member of Parliament, which means they have no other source of income. The political reality is that the Government can put virtually any motion before the House knowing that, with the exception of one or two hon. Members who generally only abstain, it will be voted through completely and fully. The patronage of the reader plays an important part. It has nothing to do with the fact that outside interests supposedly make them independent. That is not true. They are loyal to their party, come what may.

The Parliamentary Labour Party, however, is not known for its comatose acquiescence to the leader's views. The Parliamentary Labour Party contains a diversity and richness of expressions. During the Labour Government I recall how the Whips, from time to time, had difficulty in getting full-time committed Labour Members through what the Government imagined, wrongly as it happens, was the Labour Party policy Lobby. Many hon. Members of the Parliamentary Labour Party took a different view. On one famous occasion 37 of them abstained, causing a slight temporary defeat for the Government. All 37 who abstained, despite great pressures, were full-time hon. Members with no other source of income. The notion that full-time membership of the House of Commons would reduce people to becoming some part of a party machine is not true.

People may vote in this place with the maximum of integrity and with the fullest devotion to the cause that they think is right. However, if they have an outside financial interest that is seen to be in conflict, but not within the scope of the Erskine May rule on direct pecuniary interest, people outside will say that they are voting because it is to their financial advantage. Try as they might, hon. Members who take that action will not convince people outside that if there is some financial advantage to be gained by voting in a particular direction, that vote has not been cast solely for that reason.

In this matter, as in others., justice has to be seen to be done. The best solution, in terms of fairness, to people outside and in fairness to the actions of hon. Members, is for hon. Members to be full-time Members of Parliament and nothing else.

I wish to refer to the effectiveness of hon. Members. This place runs with about 150 to 200 people. Hon. Members constantly call for workers in factories to increase their productivity, to work harder, to submit reasonable pay claims, to indulge in wage restraint and all sorts of things, yet it is seen that two-thirds of hon. Members making those calls do not trouble to turn up here. Many call in only at five minutes to 10 o'clock for a 10 pm vote. Some people would argue that this place is organised so that lawyers can go into the courts, pick up a fat fee of £200 or £300 and come here later when it suits their convenience. When people call for higher productivity from workers outside, while themselves working very much part-time here and earning fat pickings in the courts, in directorships, in the Stock Exchange or in Lloyd's, people outside say that that is hypocrisy, and they are right to say so.

The only way for the House to get rid of that justified criticism is to embark with determination towards the principle that those who work here for the public at the public expense should be full-time. The 2½ million unemployed receive public money in the form of dole. If, however, they are moonlighting and are caught being fraudulent, the serried ranks of the Conservative Party talk about scroungers and people cheating. Unemployment pay is a pittance compared with the £13,950 proposed in the motion. If the standard for people on the dole is that they should receive the public income and no more, the same standards should apply in this place. We are paid generously to do a job. We are paid more generously than are most people who earn a living in this country. The standard that applies outside in factories, offices, shops, bus companies and on the railways should apply in this place.

11.36 am

Mr. Cranley Onslow (Woking)

The hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) knows that I have compared him in the past to one of the late Sydney Smith's wild curates, employed to preach bishops to death. His speech was a right curate's egg. Parts of it were excellent. Parts of it, he will be amazed to learn, I agree with. Parts were a little exaggerated—the kindest description I can apply.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman's proposition that Members of this place should be underpaid and should be seen to be underpaid. I do not expect to carry much of the House in support of that view. Much of what I say will be an attempt to explain why I hold it.

I agree with some of the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann). It seems ridiculous that we should be obliged to go on talking about this subject. I should like to see our precise underpayment fixed at the end of each Parliament and to leave our successors to volunteer at that rate of pay, which should remain fixed throughout the succeeding Parliament. That would be the most satisfactory and fair basis and would no doubt ensure that hon. Members were appropriately underpaid.

A point that has not emerged in the debate is that we are all volunteers. To hear some hon. Members, one would think that we were all pressed men. One would think that we had been conscripted to the House of Commons. One would think that hon. Members, like civil servants, were concerned only to negotiate permanent and pensionable status on the basis that our employment is compulsory. Honest to goodness, every hon. Members knows that this is not true.

Mr. Bill Walker (Perth and East Perthshire)

I am confused. Members of the Armed Forces are all volunteers and yet hon. Members rightly exercise their minds on the salaries and remuneration paid to them. The fact that someone is a volunteer is no reason for determining that he should be paid a low salary.

Mr. Onslow

I would be distracted from my theme if I tried to examine my hon. Friend's argument. It contains several fundamental fallacies. Members of the Forces are paid not on the basis that they are volunteers but for what they volunteer to do. We have volunteered to come here to pursue some personal motivation. We are here, I hope, to seek to serve our constituents by trying to improve the quality of government. We are not sent here to be paid political agitators. I do not believe that our constituents at large want us to be paid a sum that will enable us to devote our whole time to professional political agitation, as the hon. Member for Keighley would like, or, as his hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) would like, paid an additional sum to enable us to employ a further paid political agitator under the name of a research assistant.

I do not think that that is the purpose for which general elections are held. I do not believe that much of the clap-trap talked from the Opposition Benches about full-time Members of Parliament bears any relation to what Members of Parliament should be doing. Of course they should be defending the interests of their constituents and seeking to improve the quality of government, but I am dashed if I think that we should be paid handsomely to hang about while other people make speeches. Let me give an example. It is very generous of so many of my colleagues to be here to hear me, but I should hate to think that they were being paid heavily.

Mr. du Cann

We are volunteers.

Mr. Onslow

I am happy to have my right hon. Friend here, but I cannot let him think that volunteering for this onerous duty is likely to—or should—increase his remuneration. The country would probably be governed as well as it is now, so long as we remain subject to the constraints that affect us now, if this place were burnt to the ground and we met in a tent in New Palace Yard. That would do a lot to shorten our proceedings, and possibly make us more productive.

I have a second and slightly less radical proposition, namely, that we should consider a reform whereby, once a Question is proposed, if 40 hon. Members rise in their places there may instantly be a vote for those who have already made up their minds. At the end of that vote, if the issue remains in doubt, there may be speeches. I put forward that proposition because I want to attack the bogus concept of a full-time Member of Parliament. Of course, this place is the life-blood of the hon. Member for Keighley. He is a sort of parliamentary vampire. Nothing pleases him more than to descend from the rafters in the small hours and get his teeth into the jugular vein of parliamentary democracy. But I do not see why we should all fasten ourselves into that blood-sucking role.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) knows very well that when the hon. Member for Keighley is down here sucking blood it is possible for some of us to seek to improve our chances of being chosen to represent this place at a certain sport. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is not something that comes into the classification of a full-time Member of Parliament.

Of course, there are times when we are very busy, and we have to do a lot on behalf of our constituents and on behalf of the House. For instance, when a Select Committee is completing a report, and proofs of evidence have to be read and corrected, it is possible for a Member of Parliament to be fully occupied for 12 hours a day in the House and be so busy that he is unable to meet constituents who call here to see him. That is perfectly possible, and does happen, but it does not happen all the time. It certainly does not happen during the recess. The concept that parliamentary democracy is best served if we do nothing but professional full-time political agitation during the recess does not bear examination. The notion of a full-time Member of Parliament is humbug.

I do not believe that those of us who have time and fortunes outside those which we have to devote to serving our constituents—each of us does that, subjectively, to the best of his ability—are wrong to do that. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. BruceGardyne) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton. I believe that first-hand experience outside the House brings much to parliamentary democracy. Nothing in the speech of the hon. Member for Keighley was more attractive than his proposal that business should be so arranged that he could spend the morning down the pit. That is a first-class idea. I think that I shall take it up with the Select Committee on Procedure. I can think of others who would benefit from his companionship in those circumstances. I commend the idea.

I come back to the question of this debate. Probably the only authority that we can finally claim in the relationship between ourselves and our constituents is not just that we can say that we have come to this place because we stood for election and were elected, but that we can add that the basis on which we stood was that we wanted to come here to give and not to take. For that reason we must find a different method of deciding what money is adequate. It should not be excessive, or too little; it should be adequate. We should fix it for the life of a Parliament. It should be fixed by the outgoing Parliament, so that those who volunteer to stand for election in the succeeding Parliament know precisely on what terms they will be engaged, and that those terms will remain constant until the next general election.

11.46 am

Mr. Alan Clark (Plymouth, Sutton)

Before I came here, and when I first arrived, I thought that the best solution to this problem was probably that hon. Members should not be paid at all. That, of course, was the case for many hundreds of years. In spite of the strictures of the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) against amateurism, I am still inclined to believe that there is a lot going for that idea, although I recognise that, as the hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) says, it would impose certain restrictions on the diversity and richness of those who would wish to come here, and that it is no longer practicable.

Once one accepts that hon. Members should receive remuneration, it is extremely hard to fix the level. The House has tried many times, but never very successfully. I am quite certain that the existing level is far too low, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) said, not only for Back Benchers but particularly for Ministers.

None the less, I feel very uneasy about the way in which the hon. Member for Keighley and those who signed his amendment attack the question of remuneration from outside. It seems to me that in the present compromise that we have, that is to say, between not paying Members at all and not paying them enough, it is improper to make the allegations with the kind of personal overtones that those of us who sit on Committees are used to from the Opposition, when they often open the proceedings by going down the list of hon. Members, noting their interests and somehow imputing a faint aura of disrepute to them because they have those interests.

I shall respond in a moment to the personal element that the hon. Member for Keighley raised in my case. He was unable to identify any directorships or consultancies, because I do not have any, or any form of remuneration, as stated in his amendment. What he listed were certain assets. Am I expected to dispose of my assets? Are hon. Members expected to divest themselves entirely of their wealth and enter the House in a spirit of total monasticism? Is that really what the hon. Member is trying to persuade us to do? Possibly it is, because he then moved on to the absurd notion of the average industrial wage as being appropriate.

Why not fix a level below the average industrial wage? After all, an average is arrived at by taking a mean between certain high figures and certain low ones. What is it that the hon. Member contends about being a Member of Parliament that makes it appropriate that the average should be the level of remuneration? As my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) said, there is always something in what the hon. Member for Keighley says to the House, and there are always ingredients that it is impossible not to find, if not attractive, at any rate stimulating. The fundamental tenet of what he was saying was nonsense and, as is so often the case, spoilt the quality of what he was saying—populist nonsense, and rather inappropriate for this Chamber.

Having said that, there is one element that intrudes into the way in which the remuneration of Members of this place is calculated which I feel we should look at with great caution, namely, the concept of indexation.

The hon. Members for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) and for Keighley said that our salaries must be index-linked. That is an interesting defect in their arguments, and one would have liked them to elaborate on it. But although we have, this time round, dropped overt index-linking, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, when quoting the review body, mentioned its revealing phrase, used when it originally recommended 14.6 per cent. that it was to "take account of inflation". That phrase is a slightly longer way of saying that something should be index-linked.

The whole question of the index is one for which ultimately—whatever party may be in Government, and for however long it has been progressing—the House of Commons must take responsibility. We are told that inflation is the principal cause of all our woes. Many sections of the country are making great sacrifices and suffering tremendous privations. The reward that they are promised at the end of the day, to justify those sacrifices, is that inflation will first be diminished and then got rid of. One has first to question whether such a solution will produce the radical results that we are told it will produce on the rest of the economy, and whether inflation really is the principal engine of all our discomforts. That is a wider issue.

What is certain is that if it were only inflation with which we had to deal the House of Commons has the possibility—and has always had the possiblity—of getting rid of it virtually overnight. It does not do so, because of the consequences that may flow from the drastic action that would be required to do it. But the House of Commons is totally sovereign. It can take whatever measures it thinks appropriate at any time. If, for example, it were to revert to the gold standard, there would be consequences on inflation and other factors, but no Government could possibly afford to get rid of inflation. How could a Government with billions of pounds of outstanding loan, at double-figure coupons, afford to get rid of inflation? The longer we examine that question the more suspect it becomes.

Getting rid of inflation is the goal that we hold out before the people. Every week in this Chamber we exhort the people to suffer this or that privation, discomfort, or shortcoming in their expectations, in the interest of reducing inflation. It is very hard to link that exhortation with a gradual, subtle and continuing adjustment of our own salaries to compensate for inflation. I know that we are not being compensated adequately.

Mr. Dubs

There may be a little misunderstanding of what some of us on the Labour Benches have said. The concept of linkage that I favour is that the salaries of Members of Parliament should be linked to one or more outside salaries, and that when those outside salaries go up, ours go up accordingly, without any need for debate or discussion here. I agree that that would to a certain extent protect us from the effects of inflation, in so far as the salaries to which ours were linked were protected from inflation. But I was not suggesting that we should automatically be protected from inflation. I was saying that our salaries should be linked to some outside salaries, particularly to some salaries in the Civil Service.

Mr. Clark

The hon. Gentleman seems to be wishing to reduce the scope of what he said earlier. He certainly mentioned index-linking. If he wishes to relate it to some other salary that moves at a less progressive rate, so be it, but he must remember that there are always people in the community who are not linked at all. There are always people who have no protection. There are people who have no association whatever with the erosion of savings and values that is the consequence of inflation. While those categories of people exist, it is completely inappropriate for the final, sovereign, corporate entity that the House of Commons is to protect itself in any measure from what is happening, and that which it knows it has the possibility of correcting.

If everybody is attached to one index, the exercise is futile. Inflation simply rampages, and no one is protected. Index-linking is a polite phrase for isolating certain categories of earnings and certain sections of the community and putting them in a privileged position and protecting their earnings. If it is universal, it is meaningless. If it is restrictive, it establishes certain categories and certain privileges, and there are certain consequent jealousies and feelings of deprivation. The House should reflect very carefully before it puts itself in any manner whatever into one of those privileged categories.

That is why I feel that although we have to accept the staging that was agreed, and on which the House has voted, we should at some time compose our minds and accept that our salaries are fixed at a level that the House thinks appropriate at that time; that they are fixed for our successors in the following Parliament, and not for ourselves; and that once they have been fixed there can be no subsequent adjustment, tinkering, compensation or anything of that kind until the end of the Parliament that follows that which fixed them. Only in a context of that kind can we justify much of the legislation and much of the verbiage and exhortation that come so frequently from this Chamber.

11.58 am

Mr. Ian Lloyd (Havant and Waterloo)

I should like to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. Clark) on one point. It was raised also by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann). I refer to the important question whether the practical thing to do is to index the remuneration of Members at the beginning or at the end of a Parliament for, say, four or five years.

On the face of it, it seems a plausible and interesting suggestion with many merits, but let us consider the consequence of current rates of inflation. If inflation were running at 5 per cent., in five years that remuneration would be reduced in real terms by approximately one-third. If it were running at 10 per cent., at the end of five years it would be reduced in value by two-thirds. If it had been running—as it was at one time—at 20 per cent., at the end of five years, with no adjustment, the real value of the parliamentary income would be one-eighth of what it was at the beginning.

It may be that hon. Members take the view that, being responsible for inflation, at least in the theoretical sense, we should not—as my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton argued convincingly—be exempt from the consequences of inflation, but it is unrealistic to suggest that, with inflation running at the sort of figure at which it has been running, we can pretend that Members of the House should be completely and perhaps specially vulnerable to the consequences of it.

The hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer)—unfortunately he is not present—raised again and again the question of part-time Members. Sometimes when I listen to him I am reminded of the little dog on the HMV record—"His Master's Voice"—except that in his case I imagine a different animal. Perched on his shoulder I see a rather diseased parrot with a bald pate, one leg and a rather viscious claw. That, I think, colours the hon. Gentleman's whole outlook. When I hear his sad, sardonic, savage and suppurating sentiments again and again in the Chamber, I realise that the bird has a very tight claw in the hon. Gentleman's shoulder.

Why do I see the hon. Gentleman in that way? It is because nothing grows on the parrot's sterile pate. With its one leg, it is perpetually unbalanced in its point of view. It has one wing, because it is a body that will never fly. It has a jaundiced eye, because it cannot see the real world for what it is. That is why, so often, the hon. Member for Keighley and the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner)—who is also not present—come to the House and ask us to accept unrealistic views of the world.

There is an important consideration to be borne in mind. The hon. Member for Keighley suggested that the House should impose on hon. Members a definition of full-time employment. That would deprive the electorate of considerable basic rights. If the electorate were offered a choice between a candidate by the name of F.E. Smith and a candidate by the name of the hon. Member for Keighley, there is no doubt about whom they would choose to represent them, whether or not—as compared with the hon. Gentleman's 16 hours—the candidate was a one-hour-a-day man or a one-hour-a-week man. One could go through a whole range of such choices. It would not be acceptable to the electorate to have such a limitation imposed upon their choice.

More seriously, in pursuing the concept of a full-time Member of Parliament the hon. Member for Keighley asked us to seek an unattainable absolute. There is no such thing as absolute impartiality. The hon. Gentleman would divest us of directorships, associations with Lloyd's, and so on. To achieve his ideal we should have to divest ourselves of any form of ownership of land. In addition, we should probably have to divest ourselves of any form of property ownership so that it could not be suggested that we were in a different position from our less fortunate constituents. Ultimately, one would reach an unacceptable and unrealistic position.

Sir Albert Costain (Folkestone and Hythe)

Perhaps I should clear up one thing. When we say that Opposition Members could put things right by divesting themselves of all trade union interests, they do not see that argument. Why is that?

Mr. Lloyd

My hon. Friend is right. Perhaps Opposition Members can explain why they do not see the mirror image of their arguments, but I cannot.

Mr. Dubs

I think that the point has been answered. Surely the hon. Gentleman can see a difference between remuneration for directorships and a trade union that gives money to a Labour Member's constituency party. There is all the difference in the world between money that goes into one's pocket and money that goes to help an impoverished local party.

Mr. Lloyd

The hon. Gentleman has made a distinction but it does not seem to involve a fundamental difference of principle. If a sponsored Labour Member receives additional remuneration from that source, he is in an identical position to a Conservative Member who receives additional remuneration from a source that he has declared.

Mr. Dubs

A trade union sponsored Member of Parliament does not receive the money; it goes to his constituency party.

Mr. Lloyd

That brings us back to absolutes. If we seek absolute purity, it should be borne in mind that even if sponsorship does not result in personal benefit to the individual, it must to some extent colour his thinking when he votes. The hon. Member for Keighley asked us to be sterile in our approach to such matters. He asked us to remain untainted, as if we lived in the sort of fifth-condition clean room that exists when semi-conductors are made. Only one particle per billion of the air is impure. Politically, that is unobtainable, and it is unrealistic of Labour Members to argue for it.

Mr. Moate

If it is the Opposition's contention that they have many full-time hon. Members and that we have many part-time hon. Members, how can they explain to the public that there are only two Labour, but 17 Conservative, Members in the Chamber for this important debate?

Mr. Lloyd

My hon. Friend has made an effective and telling point. The explanation suggests itself.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will react fairly speedily to one of the matters that I wish to raise, because it is important. I should like to put one other matter before him as a suggestion. The question of hon. Members' pay being exemplary has been widely discussed. I do not wish to range over most of the arguments that have been put forward, but there is an interesting point to be made. I understand that it is the established practice in America that no member of the civil service may be paid more than a Member of Congress. That has long been the position. I am not suggesting that we could move immediately, or even over a comparatively protracted period to that situation. Nevertheless, there are considerable advantages in that. We should consider that proposition if we are to be exemplary and set an anti-inflationary mode. To judge from the experience of Congress, there are good reasons why the 600,000 members of the Civil Service should be below the pyramid set by the House. We should consider that even if it involves a 5 or 10-year transition period.

The more mundane point nevertheless reflects the importance and value of the proposals before us. I refer to allowable travel expenditure. We all have—particularly within central London—a wide range of travel obligations. From time to time, all of us visit Ministries to represent our constituents. Many of us attend Government receptions, and, in our capacity as Members of Parliament, are invited to embassy receptions. If we were members of the Anglo-Ruritanian Parliamentary Society it would be our duty to attend the Ruritanian embassy's annual reception. Many of us attend organised conferences on subjects that interest us, whether they be on energy, defence or social security. Institutions organise such conferences and we attend them in our capacity as Members of Parliament. At such conventions we often meet members of the Front Benches. They properly arrive in official cars. Similarly, members of private industry often arrive in transport that is rightly paid for.

Until recently my claim for travel expenses in London has always been accepted. That has been so for 15 years. It will be of interest to every hon. Member to know that that is no longer so. I have been advised that the totality of travelling expenses in London will not be allowed. I am told that such travelling is done, not in the line of duty, but to gather "background information".

That raises several matters of principle. First, the proposition is nonsense. The only person who can judge a Member of Parliament's duty is a Member of Parliament. It does not behove the Inland Revenue or the Government to tell us what our duties are. The tax inspector should ensure only that the money has been spent in the line of duty. If my claim is wiped out, every hon. Member's claim will be wiped out. Does my right hon. Friend believe that that is a correct decision? If so, what are the consequences likely to be, and what steps will be taken?

I come now to a matter that arises to some extent from an intervention made—with some amusement—by my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury). By chance, two or three days ago the report of the Clerk of the House to Congress arrived on the Congressional table in the Library. I commend it to hon. Members as a document of considerable interest.

If we think that we are doing ourselves proudly or extravagantly, let me summarise some of the figures in that document. It would be unfair to name the Congressman concerned, but hon. Members may look it up. I shall call him Congressman A. He has a full-time staff of 26 people. He has a salary bill, paid for by the United States Federal Government, of £128,000 per annum. In addition, he has a personal expense claim, which is listed in the greatest detail in the volume, of about £40,000 per annum. We may argue that that is irrevelant to our circumstances, that the United States is a richer country than we are, that the obligations of a Member of the United States Congress are greater than ours, and so on, and I should accept a considerable downgrading or qualification of those figures to make them relevant to our circumstances.

There is one aspect of that expense claim to which I wish to draw the attention of the House by way of explanation. The figures that I am giving are not atypical, but typical. I have gone through the volume, and almost every other Member of Congress has a similar claim. It is a matter of interest that the claim is set out in great detail in a public document. We can reflect on the importance of that.

Secondly, the average United States Member of Congress is supplied with much information technology.

Congressman A's claim consists of a telephone coupler to a computer, $49, computer service dual access charges for prime hours, $124, computer service for April, $875, work station with tray, $15, coupler for computer, $49, and so on. There are about 18 items, amounting to a total of .3,800 per quarter—about $14,000 a year. That is the allowance claimed by a Member of the United States Congress for his information technology support alone—nothing else.

I am sure that it will be argued that that is wasteful, and unnecessary, and that it reflects an American view of life and an American way of doing things. There may be merit in that criticism. I am not suggesting that it is necessary for us to have support on that scale. We might not approach it even within a decade. The only argument that I leave with my right hon. Friend is that that suggests a criticism, which has been published, of our attention to those affairs, and not only by the Senior Librarian in the other place. I have discovered an interesting book by the Deputy Librarian of this House, which contains a criticism that we have fallen badly behind in the past 10 years and must now take this matter more seriously. That is supported by the figures that I have placed before the House.

12.13 pm

Sir Albert Costain (Folkestone and Hythe)

I know that the House wants to come to a conclusion but I shall refer to the speech made by my constituent, my hon. friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. Clark). He proposed that we should enter into a contract at the beginning of a Parliament and that would remain the salary and remuneration for the lifetime of that Parliament. Twenty years ago that would have been an excellent suggestion. At that time most firms entered into service contracts with their employees which lasted for three, four or five years. My hon. Friend the Member for Havant and Waterloo (Mr. Lloyd) pointed out that, with the present rate of inflation, that would be quite impracticable.

The debate has ranged over the duties of a Member of Parliament, how he should carry out his duties and what experience he should have. I was amazed by the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. BruceGardyne). Anyone from outside reading that speech will be misled by what he said about tax-free allowances. He spoke about tax-free allowances for secretaries and so on. No director or works manager of a company would be able to claim a tax-free allowance for his secretary. A secretary is as necessary to a Member of Parliament as to any business man.

Mr. Bill Walker

Does my hon. Friend agree that secretaries pay income tax and that my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) presented misleading arguments?

Sir Albert Costain

That is true but it is not the point that I was making. A secretary is as necessary to a Member of Parliament as to anyone in business and one would not dream of adding the secretary's salary to the salary of the person concerned.

A further point was raised about full-time and part-time employment. What is an MP's job? Some Opposition Members take the view that a Member's job is to attend Question Time, to sit on the Front Bench below the Gangway and ask as many questions as he wishes. When they have not been called they carry on a conversation as if they were at a football match. That is considered to be a full-time job. That is a disservice to the process of legislation.

Many hon. Members spend their time on Select Committees such as the Public Accounts Committee. I could not carry out my job on the Public Accounts Committee without my previous experience in industry. It is essential that hon. Members come to this place with outside experience.

Many hon. Members do not understand the process of being represented by a trade union or carrying trade union interests against commercial interests. The hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) repeatedly said that it was different because the trade unions pay not the individual but the constituency. However, the constituency selects the Member. It is important that that person satisfies the demands of the trade union in the way he votes in this place, or the trade union will ask the constituency to get rid of its Member because he is not representing the union properly.

Industry cannot sack an hon. Member. I have found that my business experience in the construction industry has been of enormous help to my constituents. I disregard the question whether hon. Members should be full-time attenders. If they were we should have civil servants to write memos and we would live in a monastery where hon. Members would talk without having the benefit of up-to-date knowledge.

12.17 pm

Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)

I half heard earlier a remark about the fact that some Opposition Members had tabled an amendment about full-time Members of Parliament and only those Members being paid. It seems that of Conservative Members only those part-time Members were present and those who were full-time were missing. It is one of those sensitive days. It is one of those days when people want to be here but they find some pressing constituency matter. There must be something pressing to be dealt with up in——

Mr. Cryer

Like those hon. Member who have been invited to the Royal Wedding.

Mr. Skinner

1 suppose that some are making plans for that. They are probably making all their arrangements.

However, some of us come to the House to explain why we take the view that hon. Members should be full-time. I tend to the view that the numbers that accept the philosophy that has been expounded by hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) are on the increase. The Conservatives may regard that as a bad idea but there is no doubt that in the 11 years since I have been a Member a number of hon. Members have felt that the job of a Member of Parliament should be full-time.

We are all products of our environment and I came straight out of the pits to the House. Indeed, I worked in the pits for a couple of days after I had been elected because I was waiting for a card to arrive from the House telling me to start work. Nothing arrived because all the mail was coming to the House. I knew that the wages were better than the £18 a week I was getting in the pit, but no one told me to start work.

I said to the missus, "Mary, has the postman been with a card to tell me to start work at the House of Commons?" I thought that the card might be gold-edged, but nothing came and on the Monday morning after the election I went back to the Glapwell pit to do another shift. The men there asked "What are you doing here?" I said "I am not sure when I start getting paid in my new job." The late Tom Swain rang me and said that I could pack up work because I had been on the payroll of the House ever since the election result was declared.

The only person who tells an hon. Member to come here is the Chief Whip of his party. He is the only bloke who gives an indication that he wants an hon. Member in the building. The top people's newspaper—as it was until the new bloke took over; it is getting shabbier every day—reported that Mr. Speaker would be asking hon. Members to take the oath or otherwise on a certain day. That was the first indication to hon. Members that they should come to the House. The Chief Whip eventually got around to telling hon. Members that there might be a three-line Whip. I have on occasions had to take account of such Whips, not because the Chief Whip says so, but because my class interest dictates that I must.

There is no doubt that this place is a club and some of us believe that to represent our constituents more fully we ought to work at the job a lot harder. I have no doubt that when Labour candidates go to selection conferences and meet all the wonderful groups of men and women—whom those candidates will later call caucuses—they make it clear that they want to get to Parliament to represent the constituency, their class, their trade union and so on. I bet they never say "When I get there I am going to make a difference to the money. One of the first things that I intend to do is to make sure that we get more money." I am sure that prospective candidates tell selection meetings that they want to get to Westminster in order to change society and that they want a more egalitarian society and want to ensure that people have equal opportunities. Those of us who try to carry out those aims are not sent to Coventry, but many of those successful candidates do not like what we are trying to do.

It is right that some of us should draw attention to the fact that hon. Members should be full-time. It is suggested that it is a good idea to have hon. Members working in industry and commerce because it enables them to keep in touch with what is happening. But there are no pits in London for me to go down. Anyway, how could a Member be a miner at the same time, even if there were a pit three miles down the road? It could not be done.

Only certain groups, including lawyers, advisers, consultants, directors and so on, can engage in commercial activities while they are hon. Members. A school teacher cannot continue to teach young children while he is an hon. Member. Over the years we have seen an increasing number of Members moonlighting on the side. I do not know the figures, but I guess that there are many hon. Members doing the jobs of journalists and writing for the Tory newspapers. Labour Members write for The Sun and pick up money that should go to journalists. It is like taking bread out of the mouths of journalists' kids.

Mr. Ian Lloyd

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that there is no point of view that can be expressed by an hon. Member that cannot be duplicated by a journalist outside?

Mr. Skinner

There are usually about 150 journalists in the Press Gallery at Question Time ready to write down everything that we say. We have great opportunitites to get our message across. My hon. Friends and I argue that the Tory press is not keen on putting our message across, but the press is here to report what is said in the Chamber. Even if the hon. Gentleman's local Lobby correspondent is not working full-time, the hon. Gentleman can meet him in Annie's Bar and explain what pearls of wisdom he has been pouring out in the Chamber.

Hon. Members should not be doing the job of journalists. One of the contenders for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party writes in the Tory New Standard each week. Someone said that he was on a retainer of £25,000 a year. That is a lot of money and the New Standard is a Tory newspaper which hammered our Labour colleagues into the ground for about three months before the GLC elections.

That candidate for the deputy leadership of our party does not stick to his portfolio and write only about foreign policy. He writes about economic, housing and health matters and the rest. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has never said a word about that. Many other right hon. Members who lose their Cabinet posts and face a reduction in pay take on outside work. But there are at least 150 hon. Members who could not carry on the jobs that they used to do. There are 18 sponsored miners' Members of Parliament and a number of engineers, teachers and lecturers.

Mr. Cryer

Very good people.

Mr. Skinner

Some, though not all, are very good people and, with a few exceptions, they cannot carry on their jobs. We ought to blow sky high the idea that all 635 Members can be well-versed in business and commercial activities.

The hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Sir A. Costain) said that my hon. Friends and I were full-time Members for the purpose of heckling Tory Prime Ministers and Ministers. What is wrong with that? Before I was elected to the House, I read in the posh books dealing with how this place works—I thought that I had better gen up on it—that that was in order. It puts a bit of life into the place, but we do not engage in the "Yah-boo" animal noises at Question time. When the Prime Minister comes in about 100 Tory Members shout "Hear, hear" and 100 Labour Members boo her. We wait for the opportune moment to make our remarks. What is wrong with that? As we are full-time Members, we have more opportunities of making such remarks than do hon. Members who are not here all the time.

The hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe also referred to trade union sponsorship and claimed that sponsored Members support their trade unions willy-nilly. I cannot speak for anyone else, but when the miners' union decided to support the previous Government's 10 per cent. incomes policy I went into the Lobby against it, along with a few other hon. Members. It did not matter to me what the trade union leadership or indeed the rank and file thought, even though unfortunately, the rank and file of the miners' union voted in the ballot to support the 10 per cent. incomes policy. They now wish that they had not, of course.

I represent my class here and sometimes conference decisions conflict with that interest. It is the same with the trade union interest. I come here to represent my class, and it is on that basis that I decide how I shall vote on all the issues. It does not matter to me whether the Chief Whip has a different view.

Sir Albert Costain

The hon. Gentleman has misunderstood my point. My point related to the situation in which a trade union sponsoring an hon. Member does not like what he does. Clearly, the hon. Member's union likes him so much that he can do what he likes. I am not talking about the hon. Gentleman. I am talking about a trade union which sponsors an hon. Member and then tells him that unless he supports his union he will not be readopted and it has the power to ensure that the constituency party carries that out.

Mr. Skinner

In the 11 years that I have been a Member of Parliament, I do not know of one instance in which that has happened. Yet I could give countless examples of Labour Members sponsored by trade unions who have not supported the trade union line. There may be people who are no longer sponsored by a union, but I do not know of one case in which an hon. Member has had sponsorship withdrawn as a result of that kind of conflict.

Mr. Alan Clark

The hon. Gentleman says that he is here to propagate his class interest, but if the conference decrees something different and the rank and file union membership decrees something different and his own Front Bench decrees something different, how does he determine what that class interest is?

Mr. Skinner

It is here, deep inside me. When the Labour Party was in office, there were many occasions on which the Government were wrong. I had to vote against them 154 times because they were straying from party policy. As I said, the miners voted for a 10 per cent. incomes policy. In my view, they were wrong. They were not representing their own class interest, so I had to vote against it.

I understand what my class interest is. I do not get into these grey areas and worry about what my next move should be. I know absolutely what my class interest is. When all these other errant bodies veer away, that is their business. I know where I am. I know that I was against the Common Market in 1967 and right through the whole piece. My job to represent my class is to put as many lockers as I possibly can in all the gravy trains going back and forth to the Common Market. I know that that is my class interest.

The same applies to interference with free collective bargaining, improving the prospects of the low paid and the redistribution of income. Sometimes some of these bodies get mixed up and imagine that if only they hold back for a few years until the IMF or some other organisation has dealt with us, there will be a golden year coming round the corner. I am not prepared to wait for that golden year before I represent my class. I have been in politics for 30 years and there has always been a golden year around the corner, but I have never found it.

What do all the old age pensioners waiting for their increase in November think about golden years? They have just had a further 1 per cent. knocked off. When today we debate Members' salaries we find that there is some magic machinery which allows our money to be paid immediately, yet when the old age pensioners say that the cost of living is going through the roof and the taxes and prices index devised by the Tory Government not long ago has risen by 15 per cent. and ask why they must wait until November, the Tory Government, like other Governments before them, say that they cannot get it through because the computers will not work fast enough. The computers will work fast enough for these increases, which are to be paid on the dot. That is why pensioners and others are asking what has become of the golden year.

The same applies to nurses, to whom the Government are offering 6 per cent. at a time when 18.7 per cent. is on the cards. Even the Royal College of Nursing which has never been militant in these matters will be asking where is the golden year that it was told about so many years ago. It was told that if it would only hold back and allow the instrument to operate, it would bring all the money in its direction so that it would be all right. People outside know that that is nonsense.

The Government are proposing this increase at a time when it is said that they do not have a wages policy but when all of those lower paid groups must settle for 6 per cent. and in some cases less. The railwaymen, for instance, are now being told that they can have only 6 per cent. or 7 per cent. Yet at the same time, these increases can go through.

This does not apply only to Members of Parliament. I was reading the other day that a whole new ethos is now operating for the pay of those in the higher echelons of industry. I am told that Peter Barker is now being offered an increase of up to £30,000. So it is not only here that I complain about this kind of thing. At a recent Labour Party National Executive Committee meeting I made a suggestion about the salaries of those in Walworth Road, who are suffering financial difficulties despite all the money that I and many others give them. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] They say that they, too, must have an increase, and this goes right through the scale. I suggested a cut-off point at two-and-a-half times the average wage. If we believe in egalitarianism and equality, why should there be such wide disparities? Of course, I did not obtain the necessary support to carry that through. [HON. MEMBERS): "Vote for amendment (a)."] I have discussed this with my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley because he forgot to mention it. We felt that our amendment should have been called. I know that Mr. Speaker has not got it in especially for me and my hon. Friend or anything of that kind, but we had a number of signatures and I have told my hon. Friend that we must somehow protest that we cannot agree that the amendment relating to full-time Members of Parliament should not be put to the vote. We shall therefore register a protest in that way.

I support my hon. Friend's comments about moonlighting and all the other things that go on. There are 3 million people out of work. Yet when I looked at the register of Members' interest last week, I saw that there were more than 200 directorships, and more than 100 adviserships and consultancies and that nearly 100 hon. Members are lawyers of one kind or another, all of them—perhaps there are a few exceptions—picking up money on the side. [HON. MEMBERS: "They work for it."] We read that Members of Parliament work so hard that they must do 80 or 90 hours per week, so I do not know where they find the time to do all those other jobs.

I remember a Conservative right hon. Member who had 27 directorships as well as describing himself as a full-time Member of Parliament. That defeats me. I do not know how they manage it. Yet the Government say that if the rest of the population will only pull up their socks and tighten their belts they can save the country. I am not prepared to tell my constituents and my class that it is their job to forgo wage increases, because they will be kidded this year just as they have been kidded before. It is the same with the old age pensioners. If Members of Parliament's salaries can be paid within a few weeks, the old age pensioners should have their increase and more besides. That is why we have put down our amendment and why we shall support the other amendment—in order to register disapproval.

12.38 pm

Mr. Tim Sainsbury (Hove)

I wish to direct my remarks principally at the secretarial aspect of the motions before us and at the facilities and allowances that we receive in respect of secretaries. First, however, I wish to say something about the question of full-time Members. The greater part of the debate today seems to have been concerned with an amendment that was not selected. I suppose that that is not entirely unusual, particularly when the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) is speaking. The relevance of the issue before us sometimes does not find a high place in decisions about what he wants to say.

I have several outside interests—directorships, paid and unpaid—and I find those directorships, on which I spend a very few hours a week, of immense value in fulfilling my responsibilities as a Member of Parliament. I agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) and other hon. Members said on that matter. I have learnt a little about the curious economic attitudes of Labour Members

The hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) was the Minister responsible for small businesses—a very eccentric appointment. It is clear from what he said not only that he knows nothing about any sort of business—large, medium or small—but that he is not interested in learning about them. It is not surprising, therefore, in the light of the remarks that he and his hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover made, that the nostrums that they produce for Britain's economy are so inappropriate and would be so disastrous if applied. Indeed, those of the hon. Member for Keighley were disastrous when he was responsible for applying them. If they knew a little more what they were talking about, perhaps they would talk a little more sense.

Mr. Cryer

In spite of the hon. Gentleman's comments, I must point out to him that more small businesses are going to the wall under the present Government's economic policies than ever did during the period of the Labour Government. It seems as though all the wealth of the financial background of the present Government is producing not a great resurgence of entrepreneurial ability but an economic disaster.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bernard Weatherill)

Before the hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) is tempted to answer that question perhaps I may say that we ought to get back to Members' salaries.

Mr. Sainsbury

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I return to the direct point of Members' salaries.

Whatever one may feel about the merits or otherwise of index-linking—I agree with the hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) that it is index-linking, not in relation to the RPI, but, in a sense, in relation to a basket of other salaries—it does not seem sensible, fair or possible to try to isolate the salary paid to an hon. Member from salaries and wages paid to people in all other walks of life. Looking at it from the point of view of those who may wish to follow a parliamentary career, one must ask whether it is sensible to suggest that very many of them would have to accept a major financial sacrifice if they followed that career and were elected to this place.

Is it fair for such a family to be faced with their wage-earner coming home and saying "I have just been selected for Keighley. I shall win, because the sitting Member is so inefficient that it will be very easy to beat him. I shall then become an MP. That will mean that we shall have to give up our summer holiday, that we can no longer have that second second-hand car, and that we shall have to move to a smaller house because we shall no longer be able to afford the mortgage."

If we are not only to attract to this House but to retain in this House people of ability who can earn substantial sums outside by reason of that ability, it is absurd to suggest that they should not be reasonably rewarded.

I agree with those of my right hon. and hon. Friends who said that the motions introduce a salary that could not, by any justification, cause us to be called overpaid. The question is whether we are sufficiently or appropriately low paid in the circumstances. I sometimes wonder why we so far abuse the English language as to refer the salaries of MPs to what is laughingly called the Top Salaries Review Body. There is nothing remotely "top salary" about the remuneration now paid to hon. Members. I suspect that we would find many more members of Fleet Street, both on the print side and on the journalistic and editorial side, with higher earnings than ours. Therefore, to call this matter something that has to go before the Top Salaries Review Body is not very helpful.

One point that worries me about the secretarial allowance is the post-Dissolution pay. We are all honourable and would hate, in error, to claim an allowance to which we were not entitled, but it is asking incredibly much of former Members, as they would be after Dissolution, to claim secretarial and research assistant allowances only in respect of work done in relation to their parliamentary duties.

If, after Dissolution, but before the day of the general election, the hon. Member for Bolsover and I were to receive letters in similar terms from old-age pensioners seeking information on changes in pensions during the past three, four or five years, in giving such information to our prospective constituents, it seems possible that the hon. Member for Bolsover would add to his letter words very different from the words that I would add to my letter. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that his words, like mine, would carry some political overtones.

Mr. Skinner

Yes.

Mr. Sainsbury

I do not see how we can separate the parliamentary from the political. Indeed, in many letters there are direct parliamentary and political requests. Are we to separate a secretary's time into two parts, and say that for half the time she was being parliamentary and for the other half she was being political? If we make this arrangement, for which there is a great deal of justification, we should not try to fool ourselves that it is possible to separate the political from the parliamentary to the extent that has been suggested.

On the broader issue, I welcome the increase in secretarial pay, but in another sense we are still ducking the major issue on secretarial pay, and, indeed, on Members' pay.

In industry, whether in the mines or in the boardrooms, in order to determine whether a person is being appropriately rewarded, one looks not only at his pay and pension but at his working environment and arrangements. One considers the hours that he is required to work, the time that he is expected to be away from home, the amount of foreign travel that he is expected to undertake, in greater or lesser discomfort, and the extent to which he must travel round the country. In addition, one looks at the conditions in his place of work.

I contend that hon. Members' working conditions and facilities are ludicrous. One tends to think that Ministers in successive Governments forget the facilities with which they were provided as Back Benchers. The nastier interpretation is that we are deliberately underprovided with facilities because if we had better facilities we might make ourselves more of a nuisance.

I do not think that that is the problem. The problem arises from the historical background of the House. As has been said, not many years ago hon. Members had less responsibility for the various Committees, there was less legislation and, above all, there were fewer letters and queries from constituents and far less pressure on hon. Members to acquaint themselves with the problems of particular industries and groups, which all of us experience and which take up a great deal of our time.

I find it extraordinary that we are not provided with an individual room in which we can work in reasonable quiet, and interview and have discussions with our constituents and others who come to see us to make representations to us, and in which we can work with our secretaries. Not only do we not have that, not only do many of us not have offices in this building—there are five other buildings, some a considerable distance away, in which Members have their offices—but, as far as I know, there are no plans to move towards making that possible.

The position is even worse in respect of secretaries. The wretched secretaries who work for hon. Members, unlike secretaries in practically any other walk or life, are not located close to or immediately outside, or even in, the office of the person for whom they are working. Sometimes they are in a different building, often they are on a different floor, and almost always they are a considerable way away.

The hon. Member for Battersea, South, with considerable justification, wanted it to be made easier for hon. Members to employ research assistants. I am not sure that I agree with him in thinking that every Member should have, or needs to have, a full-time research assistant, but there is a great need for research assistants, who provide a great benefit in terms of the service that we can give to our constituents. However, I do not think that it occurred to the hon. Gentleman that if there were a considerable increase in the number of research assistants there would be nowhere to put them. I have a part-time research assistant now, but she is not entitled to a desk. She has to find, as best she can, somewhere to sit.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

The implication of what my hon. Friend is saying is that we had better pull down the Palace of Westminster and rebuild something in its place. Is that what he is suggesting? If it is, he should make it clear.

Mr. Sainsbury

I am not making that suggestion, but I am suggesting that when it is considering matters of remuneration, pay and pensions the House should also consider the facilities, working conditions and environment that it provides not only for Members but for those who work for us and for the servants of the House.

Near the House there are places that could be made to provide appropriate accommodation. I recall an hon. Member once pointing out that it might be to advantage if the Treasury left Treasury Chambers and that building were made available to Members of Parliament, because it is closer to the House than where I have my office and where my secretary has her office.

Mr. Cryer

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is no need to go outside the building? The building contains many rooms that are very much underutilised—down the Corridor in the House of Lords. The abolition of the House of Lords would release a whole new area that could be much better utilised in the way that the hon. Gentleman describes.

Mr. Sainsbury

I do not wish to be drawn into that argument, particularly as I have a paternal relation there, who might dispute any comments that I made.

Following the hon. Gentleman's line, I point out that there is also office space at our end of the Palace of Westminster, occupied by, for example, people on the banqueting-catering side. One might well ask why they are given offices in the building while Members and secretaries are given offices in far less convenient places and hon. Members' research assistants are given no space whatsoever.

It is not only the separation of our secretaries from Members that we can criticise. The working environment and the rooms in which many of them have to work are shameful. Any decent company would be appalled to provide such working conditions for its secretaries. I think of the inadequacy of the lighting, the heating, the ventilation, the space, the filing cabinets, and everything else. Every detail of the office accommodation is inadequate.

The inadequacies of what one might describe as the staff restaurant facilities are even more apparent, in matters of location, scale and quality. In many large companies and in many large pits, as I am sure the hon. Member for Bolsover knows, the recreational facilities provided for those who work in them are very good, though I should like them to be better in some instances. I cannot say that there is much in the way of recreational facilities for those who work here. I believe that there is a rifle range somewhere, but I have never found it or discovered what goes on there. Perhaps it provides practice for those members of the Labour Party who seem so often to show a desire to shoot at each other verbally and in other ways.

Although I welcome the Government's proposals and commend the very clear way in which my right hon. Friend presented them, I feel that we need to think beyond it, not only to find a way of avoiding having to have these dreary and misunderstood arguments every year about the way in which we calculate the appropriate level of pay for Members of Parliament, but also to try at least to have a plan for providing better working conditions for hon. Members and for the staff who work loyally for them.

12.55 pm

Mr. Mark Wolfson (Sevenoaks)

I shall not detain the House for long. I welcome the proposals as far as they go, but the motion makes the point clearly that the Government's recommendation in May 1979 to go for a process of staging was a mistake. The independent review body has served hon. Members well, and the House has made progress in establishing that arrangement. Unfortunately, however, the Government have taken the wrong decision, and right hon. and hon. Members have lacked the confidence to override those proposals and accept Boyle in full.

It is vital to achieve a fair salary which is reasonably comparable to that which can be earned by an able professional man or woman in the world outside, and the Boyle recommendations went a long way towards achieving that. By that, I do not suggest that the House should be filled only with hon. Members who have that professional experience outside. My point is that if that were the benchmark for parliamentary salaries, some would be elected to the House who would earn more than they had been getting outside and others would earn less. Broadly, however, it would provide a reasonable basis on which a person could decide to stand for Parliament knowing that, if elected, he could maintain a reasonable standard of living compared with the kind of job that he held outside.

That is important if the country is to enable those who wish to follow a political career not to write it off early in their career plans as being outside the range of possibilities for them because of the financial sacrifice involved if they are elected. Unless we do that, we run the risk of the nation losing the potential of able people who might otherwise set out on the various stages of climbing the political ladder which are necessary long before they are ever elected here.

We have heard much today of the sole versus the dual job argument. Following what I have said already, I believe that there will always be some who wish to do the job solely and others who wish to combine it with outside activities. The make-up of the House requires both. But, again, the salary should provide for the individual to be able to make that choice on a reasonable basis knowing that if he does only this job he will be able to maintain his family and continue to have a reasonable standard of living.

The Select Committee to which my right hon. Friend referred, and of which I am a member, needs to move forward from the result that we have already achieved. I am greatly encouraged by the progress that appears to have been made, due to the work of a great many people over many years, to get closer to a satisfactory arrangement on pay, both in terms of the salary suggested and accepted by the House in recent years—though I believe that we have still not gone far enough—and to put a specific figure on what the salary should be now rather than what we are likely to vote for presently.

I believe that it should be about £16,000 which is based on what Boyle recommended for the uplift of salaries in 1979. That compares with the figure quoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), who used the Civil Service benchmark of assistant secretary, currently at £18,000.

I hope that the Select Committee will move from the present base, which has achieved a considerable amount in recent years, and, utilising an independent review body, be able to recommend to the House, I hope with confidence and with proper, declared and rational backing, a method to achieve the maintenance of salaries over a period of one Parliament. That would then avoid the need for this annual debate.

I do not share the embarrassment of my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton about these discussions. I believe that if hon. Members cannot make rational decisions about fixing their salaries they are incapable of doing the full job. I share his concern that we should not have to do it every year, however.

1.2 pm

Mr. Roger Moate (Faversham)

I begin by agreeing with my. hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Wolfson) that we have no need to feel embarrassed. We are elected to make decisions such as this, and there should be no difficulty in facing them. I agree also that our debate emphasises the fact that the phased payment was a mistake. If we are to take decisions that are seen to be difficult, we should take them boldly and with a determination to arrive at the right salary for the period of a Parliament. One could argue in mid-term about whether there should be an adjustment for rip-roaring inflation, if that should happen, but we should decide at the end of the preceding Parliament, or at the beginning of the Parliament in question, what the salary level should be, and we should stick to it. There is no way of dodging these decisions by indexation or linking our pay to that of an outside body. There is great debate on this issue, but I find no difficulty in taking a decision that we are elected to make.

My main object is to support the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) and to deal briefly with the pension arrangements for secretaries as provided for in the motion. I cannot resist the temptation, however, to discuss some of the other points that have arisen, particularly the argument about so-called full-time and part-time Members.

We do a great disservice to the House by allowing such phraseology to gain widespread use. We malign many of our colleagues on both sides of the House if we suggest that there are part-time Members. No doubt many hon. Members are less diligent than others, irrespective of whether they have outside interests. However, virtually all Members of Parliament put in immensely long hours in performing their parliamentary duties. Those with extensive outside interests still put in what are by most people's standards excessively long hours in the course of those duties.

One thing that I have learnt in my 11 years in the House is to have an immense respect for the abilities, the diligence and the dedication of my colleagues on both sides of the House. It gives a false impression to the public to suggest that some are part-time Members simply because they have substantial outside interests. For many hon. Members the average parliamentary day lasts for 14 or 15 hours. It starts early in the morning and continues until late at night. If some people manage to accommodate within that time outside interests, it is nevertheless clear that we are all full-time with many Members performing a considerable amount of overtime in carrying out extra services. I hope that we shall never change the arrangement of full-time Members.

It would be invidious to pick out individual hon. Members. One needs only to consider certain individuals who serve as Chairmen of Committees and work diligently for the interests of Members, but still retain substantial outside interests. I can perhaps be invidious and refer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) who has been an ardent shop steward on behalf of hon. Members over pay and conditions. My right hon. Friend has been one of the most outstanding parliamentarians of this Parliament. I do not think that any hon. Member would want to see the situation changed or the House lose the services of people of that calibre. I am glad that my right hon. Friend has now returned to the Chamber I was paying him a compliment as one of our shop stewards and as a classic example of the sort of person with outside interests who is needed in the House. My right hon. Friend could never be accused of being a part-time Member.

The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) gave the game away in his entertaining and revealing speech. His concern in trying to prevent hon. Members from having outside interests is not to try to improve parliamentary activities. He is motivated by his egalitarianism and his resentment that people should have substantial earnings. The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his view, but it has nothing to do with the argument about how we carry out our duties to our constituents or the role that we perform in the Chamber. I hope that for the sake of Parliament we shall never restrict ourselves by excluding those who have substantial outside interests.

It has been argued that outside interests reduce the independence of hon. Members. A director of a company, it is said, will not exercise judgment freely and will be influenced. I hope that people are influenced by their outside interests. I hope that the right hon. Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris), who might be described as the other active shop steward in Members' interests, is influenced by his outside interests. The right hon. Gentleman is, I believe, a leading member of the Union of Communication Workers. I hope that his membership of the union means that he uses his knowledge of the views of the union and is influenced by them in the judgments that he makes in the House. I hope, too, that other hon. Members with commercial or trade union interests are influenced by those interests.

It is for the House of Commons, knowing the interests of an hon. Member, to make a judgment on the argument that is advanced. The argument is not undermined by the fact that the hon. Member is remunerated or that his constituency executive is supported by a trade union interest. Nor is the argument of a barrister undermined by the fact that he receives a handsome fee for a brief. It is for hon. Members to make a judgment on the basis of the case that an hon. Member puts forward.

Mr. Clinton Davis (Hackney, Central)

The hon. Gentleman referred to barristers. I speak as a lawyer. What concerns me slightly is that there sometimes seems to be a temptation in the House, particularly where the sittings of a Committee are concerned, to put the interests of a lawyer above those of the House, so that a Committee sits, for example, in the afternoon. This has serious consequences. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that it tends to give the House a bad name?

Mr. Moate

That is a procedural point that we should not pursue too far but if it means that we keep the services of barristers, it is a sensible arrangement. There must be a balance. Barristers contribute immensely to our parliamentary proceedings, and it would be unfortunate if we were to lose their services.

I come back to the subject of trade union interests. Opposition Members cannot understand why we say that that is comparable to business interests. They say that they seldom get any direct financial reward. But if my executive were funded partially by the association secretary or the agent, or if my election expenses were met by a particular body, I should be much more under the influence of that organisation than I could ever be of any outside commercial interest that I had. If an Opposition Member were expelled by his union and the association therefore lost a major source of funds, he might find himself in some difficulty. I am not saying that Opposition Members therefore become puppets of their unions, any more than I am saying that Conservative Members become puppets of big business. I believe that hon. Members exercise their judgment freely, are independent, and are not unduly influenced by outside interests.

I support the amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford, and I wish to refer to the speech of the right hon. Member for Openshaw, who drew attention to the reaction of newspaper editors. He said that they all referred to this as a 19 per cent. increase and thought it indefensible. Virtually all the press and all the public, too, see this as a 19 per cent. increase, yet he and others say "It is nothing like that at all. It is the third phase of an increase to which we are entitled, plus a little more", and he can give 101 reasons to show why we are entitled to 19 per cent., but it is 19 per cent. this year. If, for one reason or another, we fudged the decision in past years, that was our fault. It makes no difference to the fact that this year we have decided to increase our salaries by 19 per cent. We cannot, on the one hand, say that we wish to be on the public stage making decisions that influence and determine public policy, and on the other say that on certain matters we wish to be out of the public eye and to be judged by the criteria of the private sector. If one wants to be paid the salary of a newspaper editor, one must get out of public life and out of the public sector, of which we are a part, and become a newspaper editor. Newspaper editors are entitled to high rates of pay and to make judgments on us when we allocate to ourselves a certain percentage pay and then tell the rest of the public sector that they must be restrained to a certain figure. We are told that Members of Parliament restrained themselves last year, the year before that, and the year before that. Have we not been saying to the public sector—and, indeed, to the private sector—that we want pay restraint in 1979, 1980 and 1981? We are not saying to them in 1981 that because of their past restraint they can now catch up. We are saying "Please restrain yourselves further", and I think that we shall be saying that in 1982. If we want restraint in the public sector, we should set an example.

It is wrong for us to assume that we can take decisions of the kind that we are being asked to take today without being aware of the damage that they will do to our position in the pay negotiations in the public sector. I do not criticise my right hon. Friend in any way for bringing forward these proposals. He is carrying out his duties and obligations to the House of Commons, and I accept that. However, it is our decision, not the Government's. Therefore, it can only help if we accept the third phase of the previously negotiated amount passed by the House of Commons. I suspect that no motion is necessary for that, but let us at least try to contribute something by saying that we shall forgo the other 6 per cent., which even then will leave us with a handsome increase in our salaries this year.

The motion allows exactly 10 per cent. of the total secretarial allowance to be expended on pensions for secretaries. It is in the same form as the one that we had last year, when an upper limit was set on the amount of money that could be expended on secretaries' pensions. It is a measure that I greatly welcome. We have been very hard on our secretaries, who have given many years of service to individual Members in what is basically non-pensionable employment. Last year the House wisely decided to make provision for them, but in practice the scheme has not worked out as intended.

I asked my right hon. Friend how much money could have been spent on secretaries' pensions in accordance with the resolution of the House of Commons. It appears that we could have spent £500,000 to cover pension arrangements for the secretaries of all hon. Members, but in practice we spent £143,000—just under one-third of the amount. I suggest that we are being singularly mean to many of our secretaries. Whatever we decide about our own pay, I do not think that any of us can be proud of the suggestion that we are being unfair to our secretaries, who deserve to have good pension arrangements.

There could be many reasons for it. One of the reasons is that my right hon. Friend, or his predecessor, after consultation with others, decided that there should be an inner limit and that no secretary should receive more than 10 per cent., by way of pension contribution, of the amount paid to her in salary. In practice, most secretariesmay be paid perhaps £5,000 or £6,000 of the £8,000 allowance. That means that in practice only £500 or £600 can be paid.

No such inner limit was ever established by the House of Commons. It was established by consultation by the authorities of the House and by my right hon. Friend. It is an unfair limit. The House of Commons has never said that that is what it should be. I agree that any limit is arbitrary, but we could use as a better arbitrary limit that which is applied to self-employed persons, which is 17½ per cent. In the amendment that I tabled, which is not being discussed today, I suggested 15 per cent. In practice, the figure on which we voted, and on which we are voting again today, cannot be spent.

My right hon. Friend may say that he is carrying out the intentions of the House and that there were some discussions that could be interpreted in that way, but in practice it is impossible to do so. If an hon. Member wished to pay his secretary £8,000, nearly £1,000 of that would go on the employer's contribution. Therefore, £7,000 is about the limit.

We are, in effect, debating a motion which, by administrative decree, cannot be implemented. My right hon. Friend was very fair about it. He said that he would refer the matter to the Top Salaries Review Body, and lie did so. Unfortunately, the review body said that it did not have enough time and would need to reconsider the matter. But in the nature of things it will not be able to reconsider it until next year. That means that the secretaries will have lost two years of pension contribution. That could make a great deal of difference to their ultimate pension rights.

Having accepted my right hon. Friend's helpful initial move to put the matter to the review body, I suggest that some other way should be found in the coming year to review the decision. I do not think that 10 per cent. is fair; 15 per cent. would be fairer. 'We are depriving secretaries of pension rights. We are not carrying out the intentions of the House as expressed in the motion. I hope that my right hon. Friend will find some opportunity, within the next 12 months, to allow a decision to be reached to improve the rights of secretaries so that we do not lose yet another year, because it could do considerable damage 1:0 the ultimate pension rights of these worthy servants of Members and of the House of Commons.

1.20 pm

Mr. Pym

For about four hours we have had an interesting debate on an important subject. Some of the points raised have gone wider than the motions before the House. Most of the debate has concentrated on the issues underlying the nature of a Member of Parliament's function and role, the support that he might require—or be entitled to—to enable him to fulfil his function, and how remuneration should be settled. In addition more detailed points were raised, which I shall consider at the conclusion of the debate.

There has been broad agreement on the Government's approach to pay, but there are two groups of amendments to deal with. The first amendment, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) deals directly with the general level of salaries. There has been talk—particularly from the right hon. Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Morris)—about restraint and self-denial. On the other hand, my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) thought that Members of Parliament were still underpaid but that Ministers were even less well paid.

My hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford thought that hon. Members would be paid too much and that the inevitable interpretation of our actions by the press was adequate reason for not increasing salaries by the amount suggested. He was supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham (Mr. Moate). The hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Cryer) thought, in some curious way, that any remuneration above average industrial earnings would have something unsatisfactory about it. He also thought that Ministers should be paid the same as hon. Members. He did not find any support for those propositions.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) said that hon. Members should be underpaid. I have a great sympathy with the spirit of his remarks, but one must define "a satisfactory level of payment" and "underpayment". Successive Governments found that the techniques and method of the Top Salaries Review Body contained a sensible approach. I am grateful to it for what it has done for us. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Wolfson) said, it has served the House well. Since 1972, when the then Conservative Government decided to go all the way and to agree its recommendations immediately, that original sensible practice has not been followed.

The House must make a decision. The Government have made a proposition. My hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford has put forward an alternative with the support of several of my hon. Friends. The hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) was right. If hon. Members had wanted £13,150 there would have been no need for me to table a motion. Several hon. Members on both sides of the House are "full-time" Members of Parliament and have no other sources of income. They rely entirely on their salaries and are in considerable financial difficulties because of the cost of their work. Although that does not apply to everyone, it is important to ensure that there is adequate remuneration. However, that is a matter for the House to decide.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne

With great respect, the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) was wrong. He argued that if the amendment had not been moved and the first motion on the Order Paper had been voted against, we should have been voting against not only the sum of £13,950 but also against £8,130 for Officers of the House, which the amendment does not deal with. Therefore, the hon. Gentleman has got his facts wrong.

Mr. Pym

There has been much discussion this morning about whole-time Members of Parliament, by which was meant the exclusion from their lives and work of outside interests. The hon. Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) was the first to raise that subject. He thought that it was better for constituents if their Member did nothing else. The hon. Member for Keighley thought that the public expected their Members to do nothing else and wanted full-time committed Members. This would be a fantastically dull place if we took that advice. I cannot think what the House would be like if we followed that example.

Mr. Alexander W. Lyon (York)

Is the American Congress a fantastically dull place, because that body has that ruling?

Mr. Pym

I will discuss that in a moment. There is no assembly in the world as lively or exciting as this place.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton said that professional Members of Parliament—by which he meant those without outside interests—must not be allowed to dominate. I agree with him. My hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford said that all Members should have outside interests. However, that ideal is not likely to be achieved. He said that if that were so we could manage with fewer Members of Parliament. I have much sympathy with that point of view.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woking attacked the concept of full-time Members and my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury) spoke of the value of his outside experience, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Sir A. Costain). I agree with that attitude, because we are elected to use our judgment on behalf of our constituents and our country. To give a fair and wise judgment on the issues of the day, those who have outside interests and knowledge are in a better position to gain current experience in the ordinary world outside. It must be an advantage to them, the House and the nation when that experience is brought to bear here.

A Member's job is not an executive task. It is often thought outside that we are some sort of executive body, but we are not. Parliament is a scrutinising body and we ask Members of Parliament to have the responsibility of bringing their judgment to it. Although it is helpful that some Members do not wish to do that or cannot do that—although they devote much time to their work in the House—the fact that so many have other outside interests is of enormous help to the work of the House.

A Member's salary for this year, next year or the ensuing year is always to recompense him for what amounts to a full-time job. Some right hon. and hon. Members are doing more than a whole—time job—in some cases at least two or three whole-time jobs. If they are fortunate enough to be able to do that, wish to do it and have the opportunity to do it, we must allow them to do it. It is a plus for the House. We all represent the nation here with all its different varieties, characters, natures and experiences. We can do that only by allowing Members to lead wide and full lives.

The salary that I am recommending in the motion is appropriate for the work done by an hon. Member. I hope that the House will support it.

Much has been said about facilities and support services, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and others described as inadequate. That is outside the scope of the motion, but I want to see a general improvement over the years. My hon. Friend the Member for Hove referred to working conditions, but that involves a new parliamentary building, which at present raises many difficulties.

The hon. Member for Battersea, South in his series of amendments argued that the more support one has, the more effective and active one can be. I doubt whether that is so. The hon. Gentleman's amendments try to separate the secretarial allowance and research assistance allowance and make it possible for hon. Members to have both. That is a respectable proposition, but it would cost about £4 million a year and would involve an increase of 64 per cent. in the allowances available to hon. Members. That is an awful lot.

With respect to my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Havant and Waterloo (Mr. Lloyd), I do not believe that comparisons with Congress are appropriate. The circumstances of the United States and its style of parliamentary government are so different that it is not helpful to make comparisons.

The hon. Member for Battersea, South paid tribute to the Library service available to hon. Members. I have no doubt that that is adequate for the needs of most Members. If a research assistant can be justified in some cases, perhaps we should try to find a way of providing one, but that will not be easy.

I ask the House not to support the amendments of the hon. Member for Battersea, South. The cost involved is enormous and many hon. Members do not want that degree of added assistance. Not many would go as far as my hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford who said that every hon. Member would be better able to do his job without any help. There are a few, including my hon. Friend and the right hon. Member for Down, South (Mr. Powell), who are capable of doing the job without any help, but many others would have difficulty in making the fullest use of their opportunities without a little professional assistance.

A number of points were made about the methods of settling our remuneration. The hon. Member for Battersea, South said at first that he wanted index linking, but he revised that aim later and said that he wanted a linkage with an outside body, group or salary. The hon. Gentleman said that it was invidious for the House to vote on hon. Members' salaries. I do not believe that it is invidious; it is inescapable. Linkage might assist the process, but it will still be up to the House to make the final decision and I do not see how we can escape that responsibility.

My hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford was strongly opposed to linkage and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. Clark) was against what he described as continuing adjustments, which are embarrassing and tedious. There was support for the view of my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton that an arrangement should be made once in the lifetime of each Parliament. My right hon. Friend said that it should be done at the beginning of a Parliament, but he accepted that it could be done at the end, as suggested by my hon. Friends the Members for Woking and Sutton.

In those circumstances, the conditions would be fixed and candidates at the election would know the bargain and could stick to it for the rest of the Parliament. There is a great deal to be said for that. It was hoped during the previous Parliament that such a system could be arranged for this Parliament, but that has not happened and we have to face the situation as it is.

My hon. Friend the Member for Havant and Waterloo made a good point when he said that one could end up with an unrealistic situation in the later stages of a five-year Parliament. If inflation were serious and no adjustments were made to salaries, some hon. Members could face difficult problems after three or four years of a Parliament.

That matter is being considered by the Select Committee. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks for mentioning that and to all the hon. Members serving on that Committee. The next stage in the development of the policy for settling Members' pay must depend initially on what the Select Committee recommends.

Hon. Members made a number of detailed points on which I will not comment at this stage. My hon. Friend the Member for Knutsford referred to the ratio between salaries and allowances within the total sums received by Members of Parliament over the past year. Basically, the answer is "50–50", but I shall be in touch with my hon. Friend about that. I mentioned in opening the question of secretaries' pensions. Nevertheless, I shall be in touch with my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham about that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hove raised the important question of how we are to stick to the rules during a Dissolution. I agree that it will be difficult, but I do not think that we should allow the difficulties to prevent us from doing it because there is a good deal of demand for it and a good deal of sense in it. Here, I would connect my hon. Friend's anxiety with a point correctly made by the hon. Member for Battersea, South that the accountability of these allowances must be as great as it possibly can be.

The right hon. Member for Openshaw raised, first, the question of the substitution of secretaries and the availability of pay for them. That is precisely the proposal that the Government have accepted and I shall be discussing the details through the usual channels. With regard to the point about office equipment, I have not rejected this out of hand, but I warn the House that I think that it will be quite difficult and certainly expensive. Security and other problems arise, but naturally its feasibility can be considered. Also, possibly at another stage—it is not relevant to the motions today—travel allowance for Members' children could also be considered.

In an intervention in my speech, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East (Mr. Thomas), who is not now present, asked whether I could compare average earnings with the 1972 review body situation. As I said in opening, since 1972 when our remuneration was adjusted fully in the terms used by the review body, prices have risen by 246 per cent. and Members' pay by 210 per cent. Average earnings over the same period have risen by 297 per cent. There is therefore still considerable underpayment if one regards absolute inflation-proofing as being full compensation for rising prices.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woking wisely said that we ought to be underpaid and be seen to be underpaid. I should have thought that those figures were evidence for the fact that, even if—and, I hope, when—my motions are agreed today, his request will have been fulfilled and will be seen to have been fulfilled. My hon. Friend rightly said that to be a Member of Parliament is an entirely voluntary exercise. I completely agree with him. For that matter, of course, the salary of a Member of Parliament is also a voluntary exercise. I as Leader of the House must think, as the Government must think, of our responsibility for all Members of Parliament, not only for those who are disadvantaged or those who can manage whether they have a salary or not. We must think of the generality of the matter.

In our view, the figure that we have arrived at, now that the staging is at last completed, is in the current circumstances an appropriate remuneration for Members of Parliament and Ministers in relation to their responsibilities in the House. I hope, therefore, that after this interesting debate the House will feel it right to approve the motions on the Order Paper in my name.

1.39 pm

Mr. Clinton Davis (Hackney, Central)

We have until 2.30 pm, so there is no reason why hon. Members who wish to participate but who could not be here previously should not do so, despite, the activities of the hon. Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne).

I thought that the speech of the Leader of the House was a balanced one, and in many respects deserving of support. I had some reservation, however, about his suggestion that there is no assembly in the whole of the rest of the world to be compared with this one for excitement. I found that a little exaggerated.

The argument about outside interests is very difficult. There are assemblies in the world where it is required that a Member should give up his outside interests altogether. That is not the case here. I believe that the argument adduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) was also exaggerated. The paramount test should be how a Member of Parliament performs his duties. Clearly his outside interests should not be allowed to impinge on his parliamentary activities.

My intervention will be brief. I have some reservations, which follow from my intervention in the speech of the hon. Member for Faversham (Mr. Moate). I believe that sometimes outside interests appear to be a paramount rather than a subordinate concern. That particularly affects Members who are of the other branch of my profession.

It is quite wrong that Committees should be required—this is not simply a procedural point—to sit in the afternoon in order to accomodate the interests of members of the legal profession. [Interruption.] I have been in the Chamber for the last hour and a half and have heard the arguments. Unfortunately, I was detained elsewhere at the beginning of the debate and could not be present to hear the speech of the hon. Member for Knutsford. I was not engaged in outside activities. I was involved with some of my constituents, and it was important that I should see them. I apologise to the hon. Member for Knutsford for not being present to hear his remarks.

However, I am perfectly entitled to say that the sort of situation that arises—as with the Criminal Attempts Bill—tends to give Parliament a bad name. It is wrong that lawyers, because they wish to be in court, do not feel that they can come to the House of Commons and participate in debates at the usual hours during which our Committees sit. The interests of Parliament should not be subordinated in that respect to those outside activities.

Mr. Speaker

Although I, too, did not have the good fortune to hear the speech of the hon. Member for Knutsford (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne), I know that the hon. Gentleman is going too far from the motions on the Order Paper.

Mr. Davis

I hope that I am not offending the rules of the debate, Mr. Speaker, but a good part of it has related to the question of the pay that Members of Parliament receive and how consistent it is to receive pay from outside activities coupled with that received in this place. Therefore, the question of outside interests—to which the Leader of the House also referred—is not without relevance to the debate.

Members of Parliament must give credence to the convenience of those who are not members of their profession. Some hon. Members can be seriously inconvenienced by having to sit in a Committee in the afternoons only, rather than in the mornings.

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, South (Mr. Dubs) referred to research facilities. I believe that the facilities that are available to us are hopelessly inadequate. If one has to employ a full-time secretary at the going outside rate, it follows that with the allowance that one receives here it is not possible to employ a researcher alone at a reasonable salary, even if one does so jointly with another hon. Member. When the Leader of the House says that my hon. Friend's proposal would cost about £4 million, I wonder whether it would be possible to achieve a compromise in this regard.

If it were possible to devise a system whereby one could share a researcher with somebody else, so that the researcher could be provided with a reasonable salary, it would not cost anything like the £4 million suggested—perhaps to some extent plucked out of the air—by the Leader of the House.

Many Opposition Front Bench spokesmen—this affects all Oppositions, whether Labour or Conservative—need much greater research facilities. It is not possible simply to rely on the Library facilities. I pay tribute to the staff in the Library, because they do a remarkable job, but it must take them time to accommodate to the needs not only of Front Benchers but Back Benchers.

When dealing with complicated matters—in my case, company law and insurance, and other technical matters—the absence of any adequate research facility is an impediment. The Leader of the House should pay more attention to that aspect. The right hon. Gentleman was fair, because he said that he would consider these matters. I hope that I am not misquoting him. However, research is a fundamental part of carrying out one's job efficiently and adequately.

The Leader of the House presented a balanced view, but I sincerely hope that he will reflect further on the question of research facilities, which in my judgment are an important factor in enabling a Member to undertake his work properly. Proper research facilities will help hon. Members to perform their duty, particularly in respect of technical subjects, rather better than is currently possible without such facilities.

1.47 pm

Mr. Peter Bottomley (Woolwich, West)

I intend to speak for only a minute and a half, having listened to the debate for the past hour and a half.

I hope that the Leader of the House, the Select Committee and the Top Salaries Review Body will recognise that we are deciding not the appropriate salary for a Member of Parliament but an appropriate increase.

We need to take three steps. The first is to decide, not at the end of a Parliament but two years after the beginning of a Parliament, the appropriate salary for the beginning of a future Parliament. We cannot leave it until the last year of a Parliament, because we do not know when the general election will take place.

Secondly, we should have an undertaking from the Government in future—it is too late today—that the review body's report will be put before the House, if necessary with a Government amendment. However, we should insist that the review body's report is put before us so that we may vote on it directly.

Thirdly, we should deal with reviews during a Parliament by deciding well in advance whether we should take half the general rate of increase in earnings. I think that that would solve all the problems facing us. I hope that we would then achieve a general level of pay for hon. Members roughly equivalent to the pay of general practitioners.

Amendment proposed: (a) leave out '13,950' and insert 13,150 —[Mr. Bruce-Gardyne.]

Question put, That the amendment be made:—

The House divided: Ayes 9, Noes 137.

Division No. 206]	[1.48 pm
AYES
Buck, Antony	Stainton, Keith
Clark, Hon A. (Plym'th, S'n)	Wickenden, Keith
Cryer, Bob
Miller, Hal (B'grove)	Tellers for the Ayes:
Onslow, Cranley	Mr. Roger Moate and
Porter, Barry	Mr. John Bruce-Gardyne.
Skinner, Dennis

NOES
Anderson, Donald	Hamilton, Hon A.
Atkins, Rt Hon H.(S'thorne)	Hamilton, W. W. (C'tral Fife)
Atkins, Robert(Preston N)	Harrison, Rt Hon Walter
Baker, Kenneth.(St.M'bone)	Haselhurst, Alan
Banks, Robert	Havers, Rt Hon Sir Michael
Bendall, Vivian	Hayhoe, Barney
Berry, Hon Anthony	Healey, Rt Hon Denis
Blackburn, John	Henderson, Barry
Blaker, Peter	Hooson, Tom
Bottomley, Peter (W'wich W)	Howell, Rt Hon D. (G'ldf'd)
Boyson, Dr Rhodes	Hunt, David (Wirral)
Brooke, Hon Peter	Hurd, Hon Douglas
Brown, Ronald W. (H'ckn'y S)	Johnson Smith, Geoffrey
Buck, Antony	Jopling, Rt Hon Michael
Butcher, John	King, Rt Hon Tom
Butler, Hon Adam	Lamont, Norman
Carlisle, John (Luton West)	Lang, Ian
Carlisle, Rt Hon M. (R'c'n)	Lawrence, Ivan
Chalker, Mrs. Lynda	Lawson, Rt Hon Nigel
Channon, Rt. Hon. Paul	Le Marchant, Spencer
Chapman, Sydney	Lennox-Boyd, Hon Mark
Cocks, Rt Hon M. (B'stol S)	Lloyd, Ian (Havant & W'loo)
Cohen, Stanley	Luce, Richard
Corrie, John	Lyell, Nicholas
Costain, Sir Albert	Lyon, Alexander (York)
Cunningham, G. (Islington S)	McDonald, Dr Oonagh
Davis, Clinton (Hackney C)	MacGregor, John
Davis, T. (B'ham, Stechf'd)	MacKenzie, Rt Hon Gregor
Dubs, Alfred	McNair-Wilson, M. (N'bury)
du Cann, Rt Hon Edward	McQuarrie, Albert
Eggar, Tim	Major, John
Eyre, Reginald	Marshall, Michael (Arundel)
Fairbairn, Nicholas	Marten, Neil (Banbury)
Finsberg, Geoffrey	Mather, Carol
Forman, Nigel	Mellor, David
Fowler, Rt Hon Norman	Mitchell, David (Basingstoke)
Fry, Peter	Monro, Hector
Garel-Jones, Tristan	Moore, John
Garrett, W. E. (Wallsend)	Morrison, Hon C. (Devizes)
Gilmour, Rt Hon Sir Ian	Nelson, Anthony
Ginsburg, David	Neubert, Michael
Goodlad, Alastair	Oppenheim, Rt Hon Mrs S.
Greenway, Harry	Parker, John
Grist, Ian	Parkinson, Cecil

Patten, Christopher (Bath)	Tebbit, Norman
Pendry, Tom	Thompson, Donald
Percival, Sir Ian	Townend, John (Bridlington)
Proctor, K. Harvey	van Straubenzee, W. R
Pym, Rt Hon Francis	Vaughan, Dr Gerard
Raison, Timothy	Viggers, Peter
Rathbone, Tim	Walker, B. (Perth)
Rees, Peter (Dover and Deal)	Walker-Smith, Rt Hon Sir D.
Rees-Davies, W. R.	Waller, Gary
Renton, Tim	Ward, John
Rhodes James, Robert	Warren, Kenneth
Ridley, Hon Nicholas	Wells, Bowen
Rifkind, Malcolm	Wheeler, John
Roberts, M. (Cardiff NW)	Whitlock, William
Roberts, Wyn (Conway)	Wigley, Dafydd
Rossi, Hugh	Wilkinson, John
Sainsbury, Hon Timothy	Williams, D (Montgomery)
Sandelson, Neville	Winterton, Nicholas
Scott, Nicholas	Wolfson, Mark
Shaw, Michael (Scarborough)	Wrigglesworth, Ian
Silvester, Fred	Young, Sir George (Acton)
Sims, Roger	Younger, Rt Hon George
Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)
Stanley, John	Tellers for the Noes:
Stewart, Ian (Hitchin)	Lord James Douglas-Hamilton
Stewart, A (E Renfrewshire)	and Mr. John Wakeham.
Stradling Thomas, J.

Question accordingly negatived.

Main Question put and agreed to.

Resolved, That, in the opinion of this House, the salaries payable to Members of this House in respect of service on and after 13th June 1981 should be at the following yearly rates—

1. (1) £13,950 for Members not falling within paragraph (2); and
2. (2) £8,130 for Officers of this House and Members receiving a salary under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 or a pension under section 26 of the Parliamentary and other Pensions Act 1972.