Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Virendra Sharma and Danny Alexander

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

Ministerial salaries were cut by 5% and then frozen for the whole of this Parliament. As Chief Secretary, I now personally sign off any new pay above £142,000, the equivalent of the Prime Minister’s pay. That is a vital deterrent to the cycle of ever higher pay at the top of the public sector—so much so that in central Government alone the number of people paid more than £150,000 has dropped by 55 since May last year. When applications come in, I can and do reject them if I think they are too high. In fact, since May 2010 83 like-for-like cases have sought my approval. Pay was lowered in 45 of those cases and frozen in a further 23, saving more than £1 million a year for the taxpayer, including a £100,000 cut in the pay for the new chief executive of Royal Mail.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

11. What assessment he has made of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent estimate of the size of the deficit in 2015.