AIBU to be surprised by MPs earning £98k plus expenses?

Yep this. I know loads of people who earn more than this and have much less stressful jobs.

I get paid a lot more than that and I don’t have that sort of responsibility. I wouldn’t do it for that money!

These days (with the exception of a few islands), no constituency in the UK is supposed to have an electorate smaller than 69,724. That's a lot of people for one person to represent. I think it would actually be more democratic to have more MPs and pay each one less. The ambitious can still work towards the higher pay and increased responsibility of a ministerial role.

They do get "golden parachutes".

My view is that MPs should be paid more, say £250k + expenses. BUT they should not be permitted to hold any other paid rôle. AND there should be fewer of them.
Do we really need 650?

Also you need to recompensed for the job insecurity - one election not going your way you’re out of a job.

To be in the top 1% of earners these days you need to be on £207k or more. Even more than the PM gets!

Average salary is just under £40k and just under £50k in London, where MPs need to live for all or part of the week.

There’s no annual performance review but each party will certainly be monitoring performance and managing their own MPs. They all have to abide by codes of conducts and parliamentary standards (ISPA), those in breach can certainly be removed from office or “fired”. And every 4 years, we the public give them their “performance review” at the polls - if we aren’t happy with their work then they’re out of a job the next morning with no redundancy pay.

I do understand that £98k is a lot of money and most people don’t earn close to that. But plenty of people also work in the private sector for more money, less responsibility, better hours, and less death threats/assaults. Yes it’s a lot of money, yes sometimes it’s not obvious the hard work involved, and indeed sometimes they don’t do a good job but many do.

The reality is we need a decent calibre of person for running our country, and the type of skill sets that are needed can command high salaries in the private sector. There’s no denying that, it’s not being out of touch to say it. There’s far too many people in poverty in this country, but it doesn’t change the reality that smart, motivated, passionate people who are willing to work ridiculous hours and stay away from home half the week, are often capable of earning £100k+

I agree. Some MPs have no idea how the average person lives, or how demanding some low-paid jobs actually are. Boris Johnson once described his £250,000 pay for writing a weekly Telegraph column as "chicken feed".

Later, as PM, I think his rule-breaking parties during lockdown showed that he had one set of rules for his own circle and another for the little people.

If you watch a select committee on a topic you actually know about you will realise how ill informed most of them are. Possibly well meaning but utterly incompetent when it comes to holding civil servants and others to account.

@JHound It’s not as low as £50,000!
However £100,000 isn’t very attractive.

@WhisperingHi Surely you can sort tax errors out? You vote but you don’t know what an MP does? Have you no idea how to find out? How do you think
laws get passed? Have you heard of the stages of a bill? What about select committees? How do you think MPs inform themselves on local matters? By standing around at a school? Yes, you are ill informed. Sorry.

I find this surprising! I also went to a grammar school (in bucks) most of my friends are in high paying careers in London. Finance, legal, tech, consultancy (although a few have chosen more altruistic roles)

There’s good data on what they do -

The useful sources fall into a few buckets:

• UK Parliament – individual MP activity. Parliament records divisions/votes, spoken contributions in the Commons, written and oral parliamentary questions, Early Day Motions, committee membership and committee proceedings. Voting data is downloadable/API-accessible, so it can be analysed systematically.
• UK Parliament – what MPs do
• Hansard. This is probably the richest source for what an MP actually does in Parliament: speeches, interventions, questions, debates, etc. You could measure things such as number of contributions, subjects discussed and whether they raise constituency-specific issues. Importantly, raw counts need context—ministers, whips, Speakers and MPs with committee roles can have very different patterns of Commons activity.
• Select committees. Committee membership, inquiries, evidence sessions and published reports give you another substantial measure of parliamentary work that wouldn’t necessarily show up well in headline speech/voting numbers. Parliament explicitly describes scrutiny, legislation, debating and approving spending/taxation as its main functions.
• IPSA – money/resources. This is extremely detailed. IPSA publishes MPs’ office, staffing, accommodation and travel expenditure, individual publishable claims and annual payroll totals. The underlying data can be downloaded going back to 2010–11.
• IPSA MP staffing and business costs

I earn 150k in a small business in finance in the city. I get a lot of slack and flexibility. Not a cats chance in hell I’d be an MP for the money.

Industry that would see them earning a lot more and there are loads of roles that pay more than. I haven’t earned under 50k since 2009. Law, financial services, professional services. If you are an internal auditor you won’t get less than that in most places unless extremely junior. I just think being a politician for 50k makes nonsense when far more is available in many different roles.

@GooseCreekandtheRiver I suspect they don’t. Far more Conservative MPs have been to private school but they are a minority in parliament. It used to be that business people would want to be MPs, but few do now.

I think it's fairly reasonable. If you are doing the job you will be very busy with long days and lots of travel. American politicians would laugh at how little MPs are compared to them - it being such a gravy train is why you get America politicos hanging on when they should have retired decades ago

£70k top 10% of earners. £120k top 3%. MPs in the middle: top 4 or 5%.

The graduates that I hire earn more than that after 3-4 years. Yes, that’s a small percentage of the population, but so are MPs.

I’d love to see the statistics but I would expect a majority of MPs (across the parties) have family wealth and so can afford to accept that the job pays less than they could earn elsewhere.

@WhisperingHi My DD is a barrister and was supervised by a woman barrister who had been an MP. It’s fairly obvious what she thought was the better job!

It’s a technically 2 years training to be a barrister or solicitor post degree but many do an extra year to pursue a socialism or a masters. Who pays? Parents, you or a scholarship or a student loan for a masters. I do know being a barrister is full on but they are self employed so have some discretion over work. I think being an MP is relentless. DD is not as highly pressured all the time. More in bursts. But - who would leave the money for being an mp? Not many and that’s reflected in the numbers in parliament.

I think we need to pay a lot more so that people who are genuinely high fliers are able to become MP’s without taking a massive hit to their pcokets. I didn’t used to think this, I used to think that being a public servant should be an honour and then I got a mortgage..

Honestly the quality of our MP’s is shocking and it’s true you either get people who would never be paid anywhere near that amount of money in the private sector because they just aren’t very well off or people who are already rich or people who have other sources of income that means they don’t need a 9-5.

i earn 70. My husband is 125. He is Middle Management. We are both in financial services. My grammar school friends are all £75k plus. Because they work in industry. It’s not unusual for individuals with good degrees from good universities to do well once they’ve got their foot in the door.

Just because someone earns more than average doesn’t mean they are out of touch.

I am not suggesting they get a Monzo graduate job😂 or run off to industry. I’m suggesting that the role of an MP is unattractive because of the low salary as compared to industry and there won’t be a stream of decent people to take in those roles. You will end up with boris Johnson’s that don’t require the cash instead.

Has nobody mentioned the expenses scandal, when they bled the system dry by claiming for duck houses, and everything to do with second homes?

I see the argument about “needs to pay well to attract the best people”, but I have a massive issue with politicians earning so much more than average, and many of them come from extremely privileged backgrounds: born into wealth, Eton educated, Oxford or Cambridge, then straight into law or politics, only ever mixing with the wealthy elite, and never setting foot in the world everyone else lives in: Blair and Johnson being two of the worst offenders, with the massive God complexes to prove it. I say we need a requirement that Parliamentarians do a year’s “national service” in a customer-facing role, preferably on minimum wage, so that they have a modicum of experience of the same world people live in.

I earn £120k as a lawyer at a fairly family friendly mid size firm with far less responsibility and scrutiny than an MP. Our partners earn multiples of that also for less responsibility and scrutiny. And not even in London. A newly qualified lawyer in London can earn £100k.