5 Pay and conditions of service
64. The House currently imposes the following requirements:
- Staff must be employed on standard
contracts, and these must be submitted to the Department of Resources
not later than eight weeks after the employee starts work (providing
a contract to the employee within eight weeks is a legal requirement).
There are standard descriptions of seven basic types of post (Office
Manager/Executive Secretary, Senior Secretary/PA, Junior Secretary/Administrative
Assistant, Senior Caseworker, Caseworker, Senior Research Assistant,
Research Assistant).
- Pay must be within prescribed pay ranges for
the seven types of post. For example, the range for Office manager/Executive
secretary is £21,320 to £40,052.
65. Members have flexibility within the pay ranges
and to a limited extent as regards hours (from 37.5 to 42), annual
leave (from 20 to 30 days a year) and other terms and conditions.
They also have discretion over bonuses, which may be up to 15%
of the employee's gross annual salary. In practice there is also
flexibility in the tasks staff carry out, despite the job descriptions.
Members' discretion over salaries is not of course completely
unfettered even within the prescribed ranges, as the Standards
and Privileges Committee has emphasised,[60]
and there is a requirement that any costs be reasonable.
66. Bringing all Members' staff into direct employment
by the House would have several consequences:
- There would be a single large
pool of staff with a single employer instead of numerous small
teams, and the House would have a responsibility to ensure that
there was equal treatment of comparable employees.
- The House would have a responsibility to ensure
that other employment legislation was complied with, such as the
minimum wage and the Working Time Directive.
- Whereas the House cannot currently recognise
a trade union because it is not the employer,[61]
union recognition would become possible—a matter on which
the views of staff were sharply divided. The House would employ
more Members' staff than the threshold of 21, so any union would
be able to secure the holding of a ballot on recognition of a
trade union for collective bargaining purposes.[62]
- Less obviously, the House would need to consider
how far, if at all, it wished to go beyond its statutory responsibilities
to ensure that it was a good employer and was perceived as such.
67. As regards practical consequences, the most basic
is that the House would need more information about Members' staff
than it currently collects, and more explanation of Members' decisions
regarding their staff. A second practical consequence is that
it would need to have means for intervening in cases (hopefully
rare) where there was a risk of employment law being breached.
We next consider each relevant aspect of employment law.
Equal treatment
68. There would be a requirement to ensure equality
of treatment (but not uniformity) among Members' staff in areas
such as pay, bonuses, leave and flexible working. Equality of
treatment would be required both within Members' own teams (where
it ought to exist already) and between the staff of different
Members.
69. As regards pay, any departure from norms such
as the recommended starting salaries would need to be justified
by Members, and the House would need to be able to overrule Members
if necessary. Given that some members of staff considered that
there was unequal treatment within the existing small teams,[63]
we believe some auditing of the appropriateness of pay levels
would be necessary. As the Committee on Standards in Public Life
said of Members' staff in 2008, "their salaries should be
commensurate with their responsibilities, experience and skills.
Observance of this should be auditable."[64]
70. For bonuses there would need to be specified
criteria, which do not currently exist, and justification would
need to be provided, which is not currently the case. Again, the
House would need to be able to overrule Members if bonuses could
not be justified against the criteria, but we would expect this
to be an exceptional measure when bonuses were clearly unjustified.
71. Leave is provided for in the standard contract,
with some scope for variation. Members would need only to explain
why they had allowed a longer or shorter period. Permission to
work flexibly would also be covered by the proposed audit, and
the House would need to be able to require information about it.
72. We recognise that ensuring genuine equality of
treatment in these areas would be extremely difficult. Several
members of staff argued convincingly that only the Member they
worked for really knew how effectively they worked,[65]
and there is a risk that any audit would be a largely paper-based
exercise which simply exchanged one form of unequal treatment
for another and left the most effective staff insufficiently rewarded.
Presumably for that reason, Unite argued that determining bonuses
and overtime should be left to Members.[66]
We envisage Members retaining most of the discretion they currently
enjoy over pay and conditions of service, and that any audit would
deal only with clear cases of inequality of treatment (with particular
attention being paid to the pay and bonuses of family members).
However, it would not be consistent with the House's status as
employer for it to leave Members all of their current discretion
over pay, bonuses and other terms of employment.
Other legislation
73. Given the existence of the standard contract
and the pay ranges, there should not normally be any problem as
regards the minimum wage (other than potentially in respect of
interns, discussed below). The same applies to the Working Time
Directive, though we of course acknowledge that Members and their
staff are sometimes under great pressure which can result in exceptional
hours being worked. Information on overtime already has to be
provided. We consider that it would be disproportionate for the
House to require timesheets to be kept, but the House would
need to be able to respond to any complaints about non-compliance
with legislation and to require information from Members and their
staff. Hours worked would of course be relevant to the audit
of pay.
74. As for statutory sick pay, there would again
need to be a requirement for Members to notify the House of any
absences. The House would also need a power to intervene in other
circumstances, such as a Member's refusal to allow time off for
reasons prescribed by statute, such as paternity leave.
75. To some extent these new requirements would do
no more than make it necessary for Members to carry out duties
which fall to an employer in any case, including record-keeping
on matters such as hours and leave. The MEC noted in 2008 the
guidance from the Department of Resources that Members "should
keep more comprehensive records of work undertaken by their staff,
their qualifications, hours of work, holiday and sickness records,
and also annual appraisals".[67]
The Standards and Privileges Committee has also emphasised the
importance of maintaining adequate staff records.[68]
We recognise of course that, even so, having to account to the
House and provide information would be irksome, but this would
be an inevitable consequence of making the House the employer
of Members' staff.
76. We have confined ourselves in this part of our
report to meeting the House's legal obligations, rather than using
the House's new role to improve employment practices more generally.
The views of Members' staff varied on this point, some preferring
supervision by their current employer and others hoping the House
would impose more consistently professional employment practices.
We consider later ways in which the House might assist Members
more in their role as employers or managers of staff.[69]
Consistency of pay and pensions
between House staff and Members' staff
77. Some Members and Members' staff considered that
if the House became the employer the pay and pensions of Members'
staff would or should be made comparable to those of House staff.[70]
The arguments for Members' staff to have similar pension rights
to House staff was put to us forcefully, but it would be expensive.
The case relating to pay is less clear because the work done by
House staff and Members' staff is not necessarily similar. Were
Members' staff to have the same employer as House staff there
would be circumstances in which pay and pensions would have to
be comparable (eg to have a good defence to an equal pay claim),
but if our proposal for a separate statutory body as the employer
of Members' staff were adopted there would be no such requirement.
Making pay and pensions comparable therefore becomes a separate
issue, to be considered on its merits, and it is consequently
beyond the scope of what the House has asked us to do.
60 Fourth Report from the Standards and Privileges
Committee, 2007-08, Conduct of Mr Derek Conway, HC 280,
paras 18, 26, 31, 37. Back
61
Section 178, Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation)
Act 1992. Back
62
Schedule A1, Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation)
Act 1992. Back
63
MS 61, 78. Inequalities between Westminster staff and constituency
staff were also pointed out (MS 47, 84). Back
64
HC 578-I (2007-08), p 77. Back
65
MS 72, 92. Back
66
MS 4. Back
67
HC 578-I (2007-08), para 99. Back
68
HC 280 (2007-08), para 37. Back
69
Paras 99-101 below. Back
70
MS 24, 28, 67, 70, 79, 95. Back
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