‘I’m fascinated that you don’t know the size of your pay rise given that you're Paymaster General’
Tory MP Jeremy Quin left the audience baffled on BBC Question Time last night after he was unable to answer a question about his own salary.
One audience member asked how much MPs had seen their pay increase in numbers, to compare with the pay cuts experienced by junior doctors over the last decade.
Having worked 25 years in corporate finance and currently holding the role of Paymaster General, some might assume Quin would be well placed to answer the question.
However this was not the case, when he even left the host Fiona Bruce baffled as he admitted, “it will be the same as Wes’s and I don’t know what the answer is”, before passing the question on to Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.
Streeting said it was an ‘uncomfortable answer’ as he recalled MP’s pay rising by £17,000 in the past 8 years.
He said that since he was elected in 2015, pay was just above £65,000 a year, and was now over £82,000.
MPs pay is decided by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, based on keeping up with inflation and in line with ONS figures on public sector earnings.
The audience member’s question helped put into context the 35% pay rise striking junior doctors are asking for, as a symbol of the massive pay cuts they and other public sector workers have experienced in the last 10 years as a result of inflation, in comparison to the comfortable salary increases for MPs.
Fiona Bruce said she was ‘fascinated’ Quin, Paymaster General, didn’t know the size of his own pay rise, to which he said it had been 200 years since a Paymaster General did any paying.
A following audience member commented: “I’d remember a nearly 20K pay rise”.
Quin then went on to say the Tory Government had brought down NHS waiting lists, to which he was questioned again this time about where his figures came from, given that in February waiting list figures were at their highest since records began in 2007.
Hannah Davenport is trade union reporter at Left Foot Forward
(Photo credit: Question Time / Screenshot)
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