Public may warm to freeze on political pay

When it comes to their pay packets, deputies cannot help getting in a muddle.

In late September 2019, the Assembly gathered to consider a report from an independent pay panel which recommended a restructure and a pay freeze for the coming four-year term (followed by a review).

Less than a week earlier 1,500 people had marched through Town demanding a pay rise for nurses, yet deputies found various reasons to reject both the pay panel’s ideas and an amendment that would have kept annual rises.

For a time, no one was quite certain what the consequences of the competing votes were.

What was immediately apparent was that it was a PR disaster.

It seems now that those hours of embarrassing debate could have been avoided.

Policy & Resources has unilaterally decided not to award the rise due this May.

It is undoubtedly a decision that will go down well with the island’s populace. With the economy on its knees and public sector staff such as police and teachers seeing their 2021 pay frozen, there are better ways to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds than a rise for deputies.

Policy & Resources president Peter Ferbrache is confident his colleagues will be in full agreement.

They might agree with the sentiment but – as with the decision to simply announce public sector pay awards – some might challenge the communications and the finality of the decision.

For the five-person team at P&R to announce simply that States members’ pay is to be frozen would seem to runs counter to the house rules. These say that deputies’ remuneration… ‘shall be automatically adjusted annually on 1 May, based on any change in median earnings for the previous year’.

2020 might not have been the best year but median earnings were up in June (the latest public figure) by 2.5%.

Will any deputy make a fuss about P&R’s presumption?