Whatever our views on the merits or demerits of the Coalition Cabinet’s White Paper on Lords Reform I hope we are going to stick to factual evidence, rather than the cab drivers’ gossip, in our pre-legislative scrutiny.
For example, let’s get the facts straight on costs. At present about 450 Peers (out of a potential of nearly 830) attend the House regularly, and they can claim £300 for every day they do so TAX FREE. I am not sure what the average number of days of attendance in a year now is, but it seems to have increased recently – say 100 days. You can do the arithmetic yourself.
The White Paper, and draft Bill, suggest a smaller House of 300. Personally, I think that is on the small size, given the likely workload, but it probably won’t go much higher.
MPs are paid currently paid £ 65,738 p.a. FULLY TAXED, but they work on average anything up to 60 hours a week: I know, I’ve been there. Their constituency commitments take at least half their waking hours. The members of the reformed second chamber will have no such constituency responsibilities. All three parties have been resolutely opposed to any duplication with MPs, and the proposed electoral system prevents any such responsibility. They will not need constituency offices or staff to deal with constituents’ problems. So it would be generous to give these new Senators a FULLY TAXED salary at half the rate for MPs, say £ 33K, for a 30 hour week, with no material increase in office expenses.
Thus, the NET cost to the taxpayer will be nothing like the sums quoted by the doom-mongers !
You say stick to factual evidence, but then you quote a salary and employment conditions that were not in the white paper at all. Only the vague statement about costs I quoted in reply to Baroness D’Souza’s post was in the paper.
Unfortunately, I think you are living in fantasy land if you believe members of the new Upper House will settle for a salary of £33k. (MPs still earn around £45,000 AFTER tax.) Also, peers receive no office or staffing allowances at present, and must pay these out of their £300 allowance. If they were salaried, they would certainly receive expenses and allowances ON TOP of this. Then there are pensions to consider.
If you do the arithmetic properly with the best information we have at present, the cost of the reformed house will be more than at present. That’s the best we can do, as there isn’t more “factual evidence” available.
What there is at the moment are clear facts about the public’s perception of the proposals, as expressed by the taxi driver. And the public think the proposal will produce more overpaid career politicians. I presume you hope to be at the top of the Lib Dems’ list of candidates then, Lord Tyler?
I sense a nettle being grasped!
In the blog’s prospectus for an elected house, indirectly elected peers would be non executive directors of an incorporation set up to provide an income and to manage the peers affairs on a statutory basis. These monies would NOT come from the public purse or be funded by the houses finance department. Take yourself as an example: the LDP would pay you an annual salary of whatever. The whatever would be whatever your party could afford to pay you and to pay you nothing would find favour with your parties treasurer.
As a non executive director you would be granted a dispensation from HMRC for expenses incurred in attending the house. These expenses would have to be declared as P&L costs on the company accounts and subject to a periodic adhoc audit by HMRC. Those expenses that fell outside of the dispensation would have to be declared on a P11D or other such declarations and would subsequently be subject to tax and NICs.
These arrangements would maintain the houses dignity and you must reflect that you came from the Commons undignified to acquire dignity. Any notion of peers being paid from the public purse is absolutely OUT of the question.
That is about right for the Senators.
The chapel of the Order of Peers, the highest honour, would obviously be the royal peculiar of Westminster abbey.
How would a Senator be addressed? Would it be the ‘Noble Senator’ or perhaps the ‘Honourable Senator’ or better still the ‘Undignified Senator’? I am entirely with what the DP said to his house recently: the change will be evolutionary not revolutionary. Yes, the change will be on a par with the evolutionary changes of 1911 and 1949.
I’m with you Lord Tyler on the improvement in value for money with salaried smaller number of full time elected members but wonder just how they would restrain their working week to 30 hours and avoid having personal offices in their regional constituencies (as MEPs do)? Would you really wish to stand for election to the new Senate for a reward of £33K per annum and no time to supplement your income elsewhere? At that salary level it will be solely those with a private income who put themselves forward (as now) or are you suggesting that yet another system of expenses and ‘allowances’ would enable someone to maintain two homes and an office? I’m all in favour of an elected second chamber but hope it will be seen as an attractive role with a decent salary commensurate with the responsibility and intellectual challenge.
I’ll do it for £33k.
I wouldn’t!
“So it would be generous to give these new Senators a FULLY TAXED salary at half the rate for MPs, say £ 33K, for a 30 hour week, with no material increase in office expenses.”
Thought that raises the question of whether the quality of Senators would be particularly high. Given that they’d have a job with many of the disadvantages of being an MP (lots of time away from home, having to stand for election, media scrutiny) but with less power and less pay, it’s likely that most of the high-quality candidates would try and get into the Commons, leaving the Senate with the second-rate candidates.
media scrutiny
Media scrutiny is no problem while you have the
privilege of the chambers. If you do not, then it can be very unpleasant. Run for cover, as I have had to do more than once in the last 40 years.
If you can hammer them back, then there is no problem; if you can’t, where are you?
It is time for those who pass laws for us to live by to feel the brunt of those changes themselves, then perhaps they will be more circumspect in future decisions with regard to us all.
Eight hundred Lords is way over the top by anyone’s judgment. And if they won’t slink off as a sense of duty, then they should be thrown out within public view, televised to the nation live.
Never forget that ‘money’ represents ‘Lifesupports’;
and thereby money stands-for the Life-Carrying-Capacity of this Earth Itself; and must do so for thousands-of-years to come, at least until other “Planet Earths” are found and space-emigrated to.
World-leading scientists reporting via David Attenborough’s “How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth ?”
have shown
(1) That the so-called World-Leading Western populations being only 10% of the world’s total population as at today, are nonetheless consuming and ‘cornering’ 80% of the Earth’s total lifesupports and resources.
(2) That as at a year or two ago, the whole Human Race was actually consuming (destroying non-renewables and extincting otherwise naturally renewable bio-lifesupports) one-and-a-half Planet Earth’s Lifesupports, both renewablke and non-renewable.
Therefore I simply re-submit a simple but strongly-watertight formal-argumentation and piece of moral-reasoning, that oddly enough has been neither reasonably-rebutted nor constructively-supported:
“It is an acutely real Earth-Predicament this Human-Race is trapped-within, and Causative-of, this latter very evidently by irresponsible, hedonistic, ill-disciplined, unskilful and outrightly-greedy super-drawings and givings from the Common Purse, which equates to super-destructivity of the Earth’s lifesupports.”
(milesjsd: currently to the neighbouring post about “Police Bill” and touching upon closed win-win (two parties only dividing the spoils) relationships).
“Any-one who can not live healthily, citizenlike, and environmentally-lifesupportive off one-human-living, is ipso facto and proportionally personally-inefficient in the Lifeplace, regardless of efficiency-in-the-Workplace.”
(milesjsd: variously expressed since 1995).
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I John Miles should probably declare here, my “Interest-in-Earth’s-Lifesupports” to be £300 worth per week;
and my reasoning that the minimum one-human-living for one-human-being to maintain theirself healthy, citizenlike, and environmentall-lifesupportive, and thereby to being 100% personally-efficient in the Lifeplace (as distinct from the Workplace) is of the order of £300 per week (currently in the UK).
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The above shows that MPs and Peers, drawing/being given (say) £60000 and £30000 respectively (say) for a 40 hour week , are respectively only 25% and 50% personally-life-efficient, in the Lifeplace (regardless both of extra-incomes from outside of parliamentary-duties, and of whatever Workplace efficiency each may have).
How are The People to be sustainably, and sustain-worthily, supported and governed;
are how are the Earth’s already badly-damaged Lifesupports to be budgeted and managed both sustainworthily and sustainably,
by such personal-lifeplace-management weaklings ?
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19349F20May2011.JSDM.
‘The Inconvenient Truth’ which the public would never swallow is that if the Houses Of Parliament, including the Public Accounts Committee, had managed to save even one of the ‘MOD’ disasters like the Eurofighter Typhoon, or 10% of the disastrous NHS Programme for IT ‘Single Care Record’, then they could easily justify all the wisteria-clearing, tennis-court fixing, moat-cleaning and duck houses they could shake a stick at for the next 100 years…
But just as the people on the inside are hardly likely to consent to having their ‘on-the-job’ performance measured by such metrics, and the people on the outside would never consent to the inhabitants having their ‘mouths stuffed with gold’, it seems we will have to tolerate aircraft carriers being built for which there are no aircraft to fly off them for at least the next 30 yrs….
Happy days…
I note:
“The members of the reformed second chamber will have no such constituency responsibilities. All three parties have been resolutely opposed to any duplication with MPs, and the proposed electoral system prevents any such responsibility.”
I would take issue with that both as a vision of how it should work, and an expectation of how it would work in practice.
In fact I would much prefer to have a system whereby each of the (planned) 600 geographical constituencies was represented by two elected members, one in the Commons – the MP – and one in the Second Chamber – the SMP – who were in constant public competition with each other on policy matters but were also prepared to collaborate in sharing the constituency “social work”.
I don’t believe that a constituent should turn to a national parliamentarian for help with a problem which is personal rather than general except when he has exhausted all other avenues, but if he did so as a last resort then he should be able to turn to either or both of the two elected members.
It would be extremely easy to adapt the present electoral system to simultaneously produce an MP and an opposing and competing SMP for a constituency; in fact it would only involve the Returning Officer announcing that the candidate who had gained the greatest number of votes was duly elected as the MP, as now, but adding that the candidate who had gained the second greatest number of votes was duly elected as the SMP.
A form of “limited voting”, as there are two seats to fill but each elector still has only one vote, but with the novel twist that the two seats are in different chambers.
Numerous circles would be instantly squared by this FPTP-SPTP system.
@Denis Cooper: You have some jolly clear thinking here. A lot of it sounds good to me.
We need to clear the Lords comletely and start again, because what we have presently, is, in the main, a farce.
“the change will be evolutionary not revolutionary”
He only meant by that, the times scale for change will be fifteen years, with 100 new senators being elected for a fifteen year term over 3 general elections.
Given no age limit wastage, and from what my brief reading of the options of the draft bill suggest, there will not be by-elections.
http://www.dpm.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files_dpm/resources/house-of-lords-reform-draft-bill.pdf
APPOINTED MEMBERS
With an 80% elected and 20% appointed is a very bad idea indeed. The farce of appointed members and the expenses of the Commission to is to ridiculous to behold even now.
If you are going to have elections, have them! Are you suggesting that some people are just not up, to getting elected? That is it really! Something to do with domineering and status seeking!
Don’t we want people who are good at sorting out legislation? Yes! All of them!
Thus, the NET cost to the taxpayer will be nothing like the sums quoted by the doom-mongers !
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Complete twaddle I’m afraid and it shows up what your interest is in the matter.
Notice that its just what MPs take out, or what Lords take out, that matters to you. ie. What you get from the system.
You’re not concerned one iota or you would have posted the numbers, as to what the tax payer has to pay. That’s a far more horrific figure, so perhaps it not surprising you’ve hidden it.
115 million a year. 400 lords on average turn up for 140 odd days a year.
287,500 pounds a year to run one Lord.
That’s the figure that matters.