David Craig, on February 18th, 2013Most people will know that the ludicrously named Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has just spent £80,000 of our money doing a survey of MPs asking them how much they thought they should be paid. Unsurprisingly a huge majority suggested raising their salaries to somewhere around £87,000 to £90,000 a year. But while moaning about being underpaid, our MPs are actually drowning in our money.
There’s their salary of just over £65,000 a year. And their easily fiddleable expenses. Perhaps what’s not so well known is that MPs are claiming on average £40,000 a year more in expenses than when the expenses scandal broke. This partly because the money they get for paying staff (often family members) has been increased from £115,000 a year to £137,200 (£144,000 in London). Supposedly this was to help MPs with their “increasing workload”. But as many have lucrative second, third and fourth jobs in addition to being an MP it would seem they’re defrauding us by using staff we pay to do constituency and parliamentary business on their private money-making ventures.
Another scam MPs have to get more of our money is by becoming government ministers. We have over 90 MPs who are supposedly government ministers giving us twice as many ministers as France, Germany or Italy. Civil servants often complain that it’s difficult to find work for all these ministers.
One thing that may not be fully appreciated is our generosity to MPs’ pensions. If they get their salary increase to £90,000 a year, then you or I would have to save about £75,000 a year into our pension funds to get the same pension as our MP. The maths are very simple: for every year an MP works they get 1/40 of their final salary as pension. 1/40th of £90,000 is £2,250. With annuity rates for inflation-protected joint pensions at around 3%, we would need £75,000 a year in savings to get this £2,250. If an MP “serves” for 30 years, they can expect a pension of £67,500 a year. Given that three quarters of parlimentary seats are “safe seats”, for most MPs becoming an MP is a lucrative job for life.
Moreover, many will go to the Lords where they can claim generous expenses till the day they die. Others will be given six-figure salaries as heads of some pointless quango or other. And anyway, we don’t need 650 MPs any more. With the EU and regional assemblies making most of our laws, 200 would be quite enough.
So don’t believe the lies our lying MPs come out with while claiming they need more of our money.
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Is there a record kept of how often these wasterels actually turn up at work? I understand there have been more sightings of Lord Lucan recently than of Gordon Brown. Perhaps he is working tirelessly on behalf of his constituants? Or perhaps not.
And,seriously, who in their right mind would pay good money to hear him gobbing off at a lecture? And what does he lecture about? The finer aspects of gold trading?