POLITICAL COMMENTARY

The state of the politics industry

JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE, MP

Mr Pearl, the Leader of the House of Com- mons, has announced that the Commission on Industry and Manpower (successor to the Prices and Incomes Board) will report on MPs' salaries to the next Parliament. Mr Bruce-Gardyne has managed to ()bun) an unusually early advance copy of this report, and he feels that immediate publication is in the national interest as well as being in the interest of readers of the SPECTATOR in par- ticular.

The Reference

1. We were invited by the Government. as a result of representations made by the two sides of the House of Commons, to examine the pay, productivity and conditions of employment of full-time employees in the politics industry. The number of full-time employees in the industry is approximately 630; of these some rank as time-served men (known in the industry as `ministers'), and we were requested to devote particular at- tention to the situation of the semi-skilled majority of the labour force (known in the industry as 'Private Members').

2. The reference came to us in April 1970 at the expiry of a five-year salary settlement. A claim for a 'very substantial increase' had been made by the National Association of Political Orators and Operatives (rvaPoo), which represents the majority of semi-skilled employees; and in addition to the claim for adjustment of the basic salary scales there were a number of special claims relating to hours and conditions of work, travelling and secretarial allowances, overtime bonuses, canteen vouchers, and shop-floor facilities. We were asked to report not later than one month after, and not earlier than one week after, the holding of the general election following the reference.

The economic situation hers.

1. The present basic pay for semi-skilled employees (whether male or female) is £62 lOs per week. There is no overtime pay, and there are no increments for long service. A further unusual feature of this industry is that the employees are regularly paid off before each new contract of employment is negotiated.

2. However, we established (although the details were given to us in confidence, and we are therefore not at liberty to publish our findings on this aspect of the matter) that most of the Private Members supplement their earnings by secondary employment; and in approximately 35 per cent of the sam- ple we investigated earnings from secondary employment substantially exceeded take- home pay from political employment.

3. It was represented to us by several of the employees' spokesmen that this was an undesirable situation: that conditions in the industry today are such that the Private Member ought to devote the whole of his time and energy to his political Employment, and that at present secondary employment resulted in excessive absenteeism, excessively long hours of work, and the possibility of in- dustrial espionage.

4. On the other hand some individual Private Members argued that secondary employment was of positive advantage, in

of Private Mem-

that through it they acquired additional skills, escaped the frustrations of monotonous work at the voting lobby, and even, as one Private Member put it, 'enjoyed a breath of fresh air'.

The need for technological change, and the scope for increased productivity.

1. The industry has so far been little affected by the technological revolution. Most private members continue to write and deliver their own speeches by hand and by mouth; they dictate their correspondence to a personal secretary; the use of computers is unknown; and votes, which remain the staple product of the industry, are produced in the time- honoured manner, by foot.

2. There is no correlation of any kind between the productivity of a private member and his remuneration. Some private members write fifty letters a day, produce up to fifteen votes, four speeches and eleven questions a week, and represent more than one hundred thousand voters; while others represent less than twenty thousand electors or clock in fleetingly for work only when a spot check by the management (known as 'a three-line whip') is expected. All receive the same basic remuneration.

3. Various suggestions were put to us regarding possible yardsticks for the measurement of productivity, to which a differential pay structure might be related: the number of Hansard column-inches filled over a three-year period; relative verbal decibel count; House of Commons at- tendance records; letters dispatched; ques- tions asked; constituents interviewed; or even the surplus or deficit of a Private Member's recorded election swing against the national average. None of these measurements, for reasons which we shall explain, seemed to us to be without substantial disadvantages.

The status of the industry.

1. It was put to us by both sides that the status of the industry was in such serious decline that its whole future was in jeopardy.

2. Among the remedies which were sug- gested to us (apart, of course, from the im- provement of the terms of employment and higher salaries) were a call for a statutory body to regulate press and television com- ment on the politics industry, coupled with a doubling of the television time allocated to party political broadcasts; the establishment of a permanent parliamentary television channel, supervised by representatives of NAPOO; and the provision of a chauffeur- driven limousine for the use of each Private Member in his constituency. We felt that most of the remedies were likely to prove self-defeating.

Conclusions and recommendations.

1. The computerisation of parliamentary procedures is long overdue. We are satisfied that with the exception of certain special oc- casions such as emergency debates, and oc- casions where an industrial dispute has arisen within one section of the industry, both debates and votes could be pro- grammed to advantage, and pre-recorded on tape. The same would apply to letters, and a fortiori to political speeches in the con- stituencies.

2. The adoption of mechanical aids would

take much of the drudgery out of the tasks at present performed by the semi-skilled ele- ment in the labour force. When one remembers that many employees continue until long past pensionable age having to parade on the shop-floor on the ringing of a bell at all hours of the day and night, and then have to travel up to six hundred miles home after work on Thursday or Friday night, and back again on Sunday night, it will be generally accepted that the existing conditions of manual labour in the industry are not those which should be tolerated in the second half of the twentieth century.

3. Clearly the adoption of computerisation would eliminate any justification for most of the yardsticks of productivity which. were suggested to us: for as the computers would have to be programmed with the individual members' past records, current output would be only of historical interest.

4. At this point we must turn to a con- clusion which, as we are well aware, will be strongly resisted by the employees' represen- tatives, but which we nevertheless find to be inescapable. By international comparisons there is gross over-manning in the British politics industry. We have only to cite the us industry to demonstrate the point : the average American semi-skilled political employee (or 'Congressman') processes no less than ten times as many electors per parliament as his British equivalent.

5. We therefore recommend that the man- power practices in the industry should be drastically overhauled. Overmanning can be reduced to some extent by natural wastage, and no further by-elections should be held, or Private Members leaving by retirement or death be replaced, until the labour force has been reduced to 350.

6. Natural wastage alone will not, un- fortunately, provide a sufficiently speedy or reliable solution; nor would it provide any link between pay-scales and productivity. We therefore also recommend that salary scales should be regrouped on the basis of a stan- dard capitation fee of ten new pence per elector per annum. On this basis, while private members who process upwards of

32,500 a year will receive wage increases ris- ing, at the top end of the scale, to more than 300 per cent, those who process less than 32,500 electors will suffer a loss of earnings and will be encouraged to move out of the industry.

7. Finally we believe that an element of piece-rate pay should be introduced to enable Private Members to take over up to a total of

20,000 electors currently being processed by their neighbours. This would further ac-

celerate the process of eliminating over-man- ning, as some Private Members would find that their electorates shrank swiftly below the level which would provide them with a tolerable return.

8. We realise that these remedies arc drastic, and will lead to hardship for a pro- portion of the existing labour force. We therefore recommend that Private Members who may decide to hand in their notice should be entitled to redundancy pay at a rate of two weeks' pay for every year of service. We would also draw attention to the fact that there is at the present time every prospect of expansion in the political in- dustry at local level. Many Private Members should rapidly find alternative employment suited to their experience on the projected regional authorities. This happy coincidence means that there is now a unique op- portunity to grasp a long-standing nettle. Employers and employees alike will neglect it at their peril.