Anger as MPs get £3,500 pay rise while rest of country suffers Covid cuts and job losses

The Commons’ chiefs are going ahead with plans to spike MPs’ salaries by nearly £3,500. 

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has ignored calls to freeze politicians’ pay, as the nation suffers the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

However, MPs’ wages will be linked to the average rise in public sector staff as planned and the increase will exceed inflation.

IPSA said the pay rise will be based on October’s public sector year-on-year three-month growth (4.1%). 

MPs will receive a £3,360 top up on their £81,932 a year salary. 

Policy analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Jeremy Hutton said: “IPSA must be tin-eared if it really thinks a pay rise for MPs should be considered this year.

“Public finances are in a parlous state, furlough is coming to an end and unemployment is rising.

“A pay rise in parliament would be an insult to hardworking taxpayers who’ve had a very tough year.”

Richard Lloyd, the IPSA’s interim chairman said: “Given the huge economic uncertainties arising from the coronavirus pandemic, we don’t think it’s right to depart from this approach.”

The news comes after a recent landmark report which highlighted that UK income is the ninth most unequal of the 40 most developed countries in the globe.

1% of the UK’s top earners (around 310,000 individual people) account for more than a third of income tax paid to the government. In the 1980s, the top 1% received around 6% of the total income in the UK, this number is now 17%. 

695,000 people have left company payrolls since March according to the Office for National Statistics, making it the sharpest increase in a quarterly rise since 2009, following the 2008 financial crisis. 

More than a third of the UK’s employers have plans to make staff redundant over the next three months. 37% of more than 2,000 managers surveyed by YouGov said they will make staff redundant by the end of the year, following the end of the furlough scheme on October 31st.

Rishi Sunak has recently come under fire for supporting ‘only viable jobs’ and explaining that everyone, from ‘all walks of life’, has to ‘adapt and adjust to the new reality’.

Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, said: “These are viable businesses that just need support to cope with the restrictions the government has imposed on them.”

Explaining that Sunak is ‘pulling up the drawbridge at the worst possible time’. 

She added: “This wasn’t by accident – it was by design. This sink or swim mentality is a throwback to the worst days of Thatcher, and just like in the 1980s, people on the lowest incomes will pay the highest price.”