Agencies/London
Government ministers will have their pay frozen for another five years as the government tries to reduce the budget deficit, Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday.
Cabinet ministers receive £134,565 a year, including their parliamentary salary. Their pay has been frozen since 2010, when it was cut by 5% as part of the then-coalition government’s austerity efforts.
The move will save £4mn by 2020 and the prime minister said it sent a clear signal that he was intent on showing that his “all in this together” approach continued.
Cameron said the decision to freeze ministerial pay for the duration of the parliament was part of his “One Nation” approach to tackling the deficit and becoming a country where “all hard-working people can get on”.
Cameron’s Conservatives, who won a surprise majority in this month’s election, have pledged to find £25bn of spending cuts over the next two years as they seek to turn a 5% budget deficit into a surplus by 2018-19.
“We will continue to take the difficult decisions necessary to bring spending down and secure our economy,” Cameron wrote in the Sunday Times newspaper.
“I’ve decided to freeze the pay of the ministers in the government ... as we continue knuckling down as country, we will all play our part.”
Cameron said the decision to freeze ministerial pay for the duration of the parliament was part of his “One Nation” approach to tackling the deficit and becoming a country where “all hard-working people can get on”.
“We can’t pretend there’s not still a long way to go. We’ve halved the deficit as a share of the economy - but there’s still half of it left to pay off.
“So we will continue to take the difficult decisions necessary to bring spending down and secure our economy. As we go about doing that, I want people to be in no doubt: I said five years ago we were all in this together, and five years on, nothing has changed.
An independent body which oversees lawmakers’ pay and expenses has recommended all 650 members of parliament, including ministers, receive a 10% pay rise this year which would take their parliamentary salary to £74,000. Cameron has called on it to reconsider this proposal.
In the past when the independent body has raised lawmakers’ pay, the government has decreased what ministers earn on top of their MP salary so that their overall package remains unchanged.
u201cWe will continue to take the difficult decisions necessary to bring spending down and secure our economyu201d
