IPSA's consultations and policy on pay

I would first like to provide some information about IPSA’s position.

IPSA is the independent statutory body responsible for regulating MPs’ pay, pensions and business costs. Section 4A of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 requires us to review MPs’ salaries in the first year of each parliament, which we are currently undertaking following the General Election in December 2019.

We are consulting on the right approach to use in making periodic adjustments to MPs’ salaries, and we have proposed continuing to link MPs’ salaries to changes in public sector salaries, as published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is the approach we have used since 2015, when we concluded an extensive review of how to set and update MPs’ pay in a way that was fair to both MPs and taxpayers.

At this stage, we do not know what the amount of any change to MPs’ salaries resulting from this approach would be, as ONS has yet to publish the relevant data. Our proposal is that whatever the rise, or fall, in the benchmark, that would determine the change to MPs’ pay from April next year.

The consultation was launched on 8 October and closes on 6 November.

You can read the full consultation document.

The consultation document also sets out, in the annexes, the current methodology for making adjustments to MPs’ pay.

The IPSA Board will consider all responses received before making a decision, which will be published later this year.

To respond specifically to your FOI request. The Prime Minister of the day is a statutory consultee on all matters relating to MPs and their pay.

In the first parliament in which IPSA was established it carried out a consultation over a number of years on MPs’ pay and pensions. At the time of the Prime Minister’s statement in December 2013 the consultation was not yet concluded; this happened in July 2015 and took into account the view of the Prime Minister and others who had responded to the consultation. The results can be viewed here.

In terms of the view of the public, IPSA considers the responses received to all consultations and you can see the reports from our previous consultations on MPs’ pay on the page listed above.