Pay and pensions

Hanging around the Members' lobby last night, in between votes on the railways, MPs had loftier matters on the mind - their pay. Talk was of unfairness, rebellions and pressure being bought to bear on their respective front benches to allow a free vote. They want 2.8 per cent -- but the parsimonious Gordon Brown wants to keep it below the symbolic 2 per cent which he has imposed on the police.

Interesting, then, to compare notes with a BBC colleague who was trying to do a piece on MPs' pay but found it hard to get anyone on camera to talk about the issue.

This has now been brought into sharp focus by the Financial Times, which came across a footnote on MPs' pensions in the public accounts which could undermine backbenchers' demands. This reveals the cost to the taxpayer of MPs’ pensions could be £16.5 million - more than double the £7.8 million official Treasury estimate. Officially the cost to taxpayers is 18.1 per cent of an MP’s salary – one of the world’s most generous pension schemes. But using private sector accounting assumptions rather than the government actuarial estimate, this jumps to 38 per cent.

If what is chillingly described as "more realistic longevity assumptions" are taken into account, the annual cost to taxpayers to be £20.5m - 48 per cent.