Committee presidents could get a pay cut

But most other deputies would get a slight increase – less than £1,000 a year – under an amendment which aims to restructure States members’ remuneration without increasing total costs to the taxpayer.

Policy & Resources has already rejected recommendations from an independent panel which it calculated could have cost an additional £780,000 over the 2025-29 States term, but Yvonne Burford is unhappy with aspects of the senior committee’s own proposals.

‘The pay review panel proposed that the total cost of pay for States members should be increased by £195,000 a year and I am in full agreement with P&R that such an increase is totally untenable and unjustifiable at a time when many families on the island are struggling to make ends meet,’ she said.

‘The purpose of my amendment is to correct some anomalies in the proposals in the policy letter, while staying within the current pay envelope.’

Deputy Burford’s amendment would cut the annual remuneration of the P&R president from about £84,700 to just under £82,300 and reduce the pay of principal committees’ presidents and P&R members from about £65,100 to just under £63,200 a year.

It would also take about £9,000 a year off the pay of the president of the Scrutiny Management Committee, a role Deputy Burford currently holds, and the president of the States Assembly & Constitution Committee, taking each down to about £56,000.

But the remuneration of the president of the Development & Planning Authority would be put up by about £8,000 a year to make it equal to the pay of the presidents of Scrutiny and Sacc.

‘We do not think any of these are currently set at the correct level,’ said Deputy Burford and her seconder, DPA president Deputy Victoria Oliver, in a short report supporting their amendment.

‘We believe that the parliamentary committees are set too high and the DPA is set too low.

‘However, P&R is proposing that these three presidents are in future paid the same as an ordinary deputy who sits on a principal committee, and we disagree with this.’

Their amendment, which is effectively an alternative pay scheme to the one put forward by P&R, would also scrap the senior committee’s idea of re-introducing different rates of pay for ordinary members of principal and minor committees, instead setting a catch-all basic salary.

‘We are opposed to the principle of paying a deputy extra for sitting on a committee as an ordinary member, whatever committee that is, P&R excepted.

‘This was done in the past and it was stopped as it engendered perverse behaviour, with members standing for committees simply for the extra money.

‘It should be a given that a person standing for the role of deputy should expect to do committee work.’

The Burford/Oliver amendment would retain a proposal from P&R to scrap the next annual pay uplift for deputies which is due to be paid on 1 May.

P&R’s policy letter on deputies’ pay is on the agenda for the States meeting which starts this Wednesday, although it will be debated only once the Assembly has completed a lengthy list of other items deferred from its previous meeting.