Ministers’ pay frozen for five more years
GOVERNMENT ministers’ pay will be frozen for another five years, David Cameron announced yesterday, to show “we are all in this together”.
Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech and next month’s Budget will propose new welfare benefit freezes and cuts.
But the Prime Minister’s announcement, which continues a freeze he imposed in 2010, will dismay many less well- off colleagues. Cabinet ministers receive £ 134,565 a year, which includes £ 67,000 salary for being an MP.
Junior ministers get a total of nearly £ 89,500 and the PM earns £ 142,500.
Freezing the ministerial part of their pay, which they get on top of their wages for being MPs, will save some £ 800,000 a year or £ 4million by 2020.
Underlining that many tough decisions are still needed to pay off the national deficit, Mr Cameron said: “I said five years ago we were all in this together, and five years on nothing has changed.”
Freezing ministerial pay was “for me, just one step which sends out a clear signal: that as we continue knuckling down as a country, we will all play our part”.
He has also opposed a recommendation from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority ( Ipsa) that MPs’ pay should rise by nine per cent from about £ 67,000 to £ 74,000 a year.
The PM has no formal power in that matter but along with other leaders has said it would be wrong at a time of austerity which includes a one per cent cap on public sector pay rises.
Many ministers and MPs grumble that continual pay freezes make it increasingly difficult for those who are not so rich to support families and maintain constituency and London bases.
Senior Tory MP Charles Walker, one of the few in the House who is prepared to speak publicly against pay restraint, said: “We set up Ipsa to take the issue of MPs’ pay away from MPs. To go back on that would be a disaster.
“We cannot have a monocultural Parliament that over time excludes professional middle- class people.
“It will only be political anoraks and the well- off. That will be a really bad day for democracy.”