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Write your own cheque

January 21st, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · 2 Comments · Politics

There has recently been a lot of talk about what MPs should get paid, and whether or not they should be able to set their own pay.

The easier of those questions is the second one.  I think most people, even if they are MPs, think its a bit distasteful for MPs to set their own pay, although in a way its hard for them not to.  You can give the responsibility to an independent body, but is anything really that independent?   Who chooses the members of that body? MPs?  Somebody who owes their job to MPs or ministers or might owe their next job to MPs or ministers?

Its a bit like the Bank of England setting interest rates.  The panel there may be independent but they don’t want to go out of their way to piss the government off.   All that is a bit cynical though: and group of non-MPs will be a bit more objective about it than a group of MPs.

This is not to say that any independent body would necessarily decide that MPs need to tighten their belts.  It could be that an impartial person would decide MPs are underpaid and enforce a pay rise larger than MPs would have the cheek to suggest.

The answer could lie with the first question.  If a suitable level of pay is found that is not an absolute figure but a formula then the level of pay would calculate itself every year.  A figure pegged to some sort of civil service pay grade is sometimes suggested, although it is normally senior civil servants or judiciary that are identified.  Last week Marcel Berlins was writing about pegging MPs’ pay to judges’ pay, for example.

I was thinking that a formula linked to the pay of of nurses, teachers, police and firemen might be more fun.   Grab a load of salaries like that and add them together.  Decide what MPs are worth and see what you need to divide that total by in order to come to the ‘right’ number.  From then on you use the same basket of salaries and same co-efficient to calculate politicians’ wages.  If they shaft the public sector they shaft themselves 🙂

You could incentivise it further by throwing in some other measurements of things which are desirable.  For example, how about adding up a load of representative salaries which comes to a really big number and then apply the percentage of the country’s energy which comes from renewable sources to it?  If we are getting 100% of our energy from renewable sources they get the jackpot and keep the lot and nobody would mind because they earned it.

Of course… anyone can see the problems with this, but its fun to think sideways sometimes.  Choosing the criteria for performance-related pay is in itself a political act.  By linking pay to the tax rate, for instance, you are making a statement about whether taxes should be higher or lower.  By linking it to public sector pay you are saying that should be higher, and these are the sort of things parties disagree on.

The biggest problem with deciding what an MP is worth is, of course, that they are not all the same.   Some will spend a lot of time in Parliament doing their legislating job, some will spend a lot of time in their constituency solving local problems or just answering letters.  Some will manage to do both and some will do as close to bugger all as they can get away with, and yet they all get paid the same.

That is the real problem.  When we hear about MPs’ pay we often think of a specific MP and their circumstances and performance, or as much as we know about it.  Often, the first MP we think of is one we disapprove of or who we suspect to be one of the slackers and think they are overpaid, therefore they all are.   Or we might think of one who previously earned, or has the potential to earn a fortune in the City or at the bar and feel they are underpaid.

In real life, of course, we sort that sort of thing out by having performance appraisals, but you can’t easily do that for politicians.  For a start a lot of what they do is so subjective – Thatcher set out to kill off the mining industry and succeeded : do you judge the performance or the intention?

You could argue that elections are the politicians’ equivalent of an appraisal, but they aren’t really.  For a start they happen after the event and don’t happen every year, but they also do not apply to individuals ((especially if PR is used)) – most voters don’t base their decision on their own MP’s performance but on their leader’s performance.

Its difficult isn’t it?  Look at it some ways and it almost seems that MPs are the best-placed to make the decision after all!   But the idea that they should not set their own pay is one of the few aspects of the debate I am sure of, and which has a bit of a consensus.  All I can conclude is that I think there should be some way to reward better-performing members (or punish the chancers) and some some way to link all their pay to some sort of agreed targets.

I shall conveniently gloss over the impossibility of  agreeing targets, the difficulty of finding a formula to link pay to those targets and the even greater difficulty of measuring individual performance, and kid myself that I have solved another of today’s great problems.  And if I haven’t I can at least say I have invented a decent topic of pub conversation for political anoraks – coming up with ever more ridiculous metrics and KPIs to determine MPs’ pay rises.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • skud's sister

    There was a lot of talk on the tv this morning about MPs pay. The usual stuff about needing to pay them huge amounts so that we now how important they are… I did have to take exception to one point made though; that it was difficult for some MPs to, basically, make ends meet on the best part of £61k a year plus fairly generous expenses. I have now decided that if an MP can’t make that amount of money stretch far enough they a) are totally out of touch with at least 90% of the country and b) forgot to marry the top flight lawyer to keep them in new pants and tapioca.

  • Ash

    Why not just pay them exactly the same amount they earned before they become an MP? – after all that was their ‘worth’ in the free market.