Regional Pay

Debate between Phil Wilson and Aidan Burley

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Burley]

I want the private sector in the west midlands to flourish. One of the most astonishing facts I have learned since becoming an MP is that between 1997 and 2007 the number of jobs in the private sector in the entire west midlands region fell. During the boom years of the hon. Gentleman’s Government, private sector employment went down, and I do not want to crowd out private sector growth in the west midlands. That is why this regional pay debate is so important.

I read an amazing article on the ConservativeHome website, with which I totally disagreed. It stated:

“Many Tory MPs with small majorities need to keep as many public sector workers onside as possible in order to keep their seats at the next election…For this reason, expect Lib Dems and low-majority Tory MPs to have grave concerns about any regional pay proposals—and expect the plans to be significantly changed or dropped altogether.”

Well, I am a low-majority Tory MP, and I believe this House is at its best when it is at its boldest, and I would be greatly saddened if everything we did was driven by narrow regard for our own majorities and saving our own skin and seats.

The fact that the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), read out the number of state workers in each of our constituencies says all we need to know about Labour’s approach: stuff their mouths with gold and buy votes. That is the approach of the Labour party, and the hon. Lady did precisely that tonight.

We must do what is right for the country, and what is right for the country is for the Government to do everything they can to enable the private sector to flourish, so that it can pay the taxes that fund the vital public services that all our constituents rely on, not just fund the pay of the public sector workers who happen to live in our constituencies.

[Phil Wilson]

What advice would the hon. Gentleman give to his party colleague, the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), who has a substantial majority and who has said that there is no economic case for regional pay?

[Mr Burley]

I am sure we will hear from my hon. Friend in due course, and I will let him make his own arguments, but in the very short time I have left I want to focus on the principle behind this debate, which is whether there are different costs of living in different parts of the country and, if so, whether that should be reflected in state pay. The simple answer to both those questions is yes.

Someone commented in response to the ConservativeHome article to which I have referred:

“Perhaps an experiment over a 2 year period to prove Regional Salaries are such a great idea? Begin with MPs and their staff. No doubt they will jump at the chance to lead by example?”

I propose to do exactly that. I have to hand the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority bandings for accommodation expenditure—the amount that can be claimed by MPs to live in their constituency. Guess what? Yes, they vary by constituency. As MP for Cannock Chase I could claim £10,950 a year to pay my rent and bills, if I were to claim expenses for living locally, which I do not. The Member for Cambridge can claim £15,150—nearly 50% more than I can claim. The Members for North Somerset and North West Hampshire can claim £13,750, whereas the Member of North Swindon can claim just £12,350. So there we have it: there is regional variation in what MPs can claim to live, based on the cost of living in their area. If it is good enough for MPs, why should it not be reflected in the pay packets of other public sector workers?

Let us examine the arrangements for employing our staff. If I employ a senior caseworker in the London area, I have to pay him £23,000 to £31,000. If I employ him in my constituency, I have to pay him only £19,000 to £28,000. A senior parliamentary assistant can be paid up to £42,000 in London, whereas they can start on just £30,000 in my constituency. So the answer to the blogger is that MPs and their staff are already subject to regional variations in pay and allowances, and are living proof of the established principle of regional pay born out of different regional costs of living.

Let us put it the other way round: if the Opposition truly believe in national pay bargaining and public sector salaries being set nationally, will they intervene on me now to say that my staff in London should have their salaries reduced to match those of my staff in Cannock? Or should I be able to claim as much to live in a house in Cannock as to live a house in Cambridge? Of course not. Today’s debate is about whether public sector pay should be relative to private sector wages, and the simple truth is that it must.

The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury has said that regional pay will

“prove costly to the public purse and exacerbate regional inequalities”.

On the contrary, crowding out the private sector in the regions of our country is what will exacerbate regional inequalities, and setting a higher than locally appropriate wage bill means that public sector money is not allocated as effectively as it could be within local areas. I noted that she did not reply to the quote in my intervention, so I will repeat it to her now. Unison has said in its location-based pay differentiation paper of September 2011 that

“location-based pay systems offer increased flexibility and a systematic approach to addressing recruitment and retention issues at a local level.”

Government Members agree with Unison in that analysis, and I shall be interested to hear whether any Labour Members, many of whom will doubtless be taking donations from Unison to their constituency Labour parties, also do.

The Government are right to look at more local, market-facing pay and to end the anomaly of national pay bargaining—

Trade Union Officials (Public Funding)

Debate between Phil Wilson and Aidan Burley

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Burley]

I will give way in a minute.

In addition, union learning representatives are entitled to paid time off for duties including analysing learning or training needs, providing information about learning and training matters, arranging learning or training or promoting the values of learning and training. I ask the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, who is chuntering, is not all that the job of the human resources department?

In 2004—[Interruption.] Just be quiet. In 2004, the Labour Government made a commitment to boost the number of union learning representatives in the work force to 20,000, a threefold increase. The upshot is that a significant number of union representatives—nearly 2,500 full-time equivalents—are fully paid for by public funds. That means that the trade unions themselves do not bear their own representation costs.

[Phil Wilson]

Speaking as somebody who in the early 1980s was a member of the Civil and Public Services Association and received facility time to work as a trade union representative, may I say that where I worked was 90%-plus union organised, and we did not have any strikes? We had a great working relationship in the building, because we could sit down and talk through problems with the management, who enjoyed it. If we started where the hon. Gentleman wants, we would end up where part of my union ended up. In 1984, the CPSA was banned from GCHQ—