Ministers' allowances was an administrative mess

The mess on the salaries of ministers and parliamentary secretaries is not the Prime Minister’s own doing, of course. But this means that someone failed him badly and he has to take action against whoever it was.

As I see it, there were two separate decisions on ministers’ pay packet and MPs’ honoraria taken after the electoral victory of 2008.

The first decision was that ministers should be paid their salaries over and above the honoraria they received as MPs. I am in total agreement with this decision, not only for the reasons given by the Prime Minister. From experience, I know that when one became a minister, one had to give up all the income from his job or private practice for the difference between a minister’s salary and an MP’s honorarium. This made little sense.

In my days, I used to get some Lm3,500 as an MP and this was upped to some Lm7,000 when I became a minister – meaning I had to give up my private practice for Lm3,500 or thereabouts. Of course, I am speaking of 1987 money, but the point is still the same. Becoming a minister meant being given enormous responsibilities without being adequately compensated.

The other decision was to raise the level of the honorarium paid to MPs – a decision about which the Opposition was to be consulted. It seems that although it was very much aware of this decision – whatever it now says – the Opposition was never officially consulted about the proposed new level of the honorarium paid to MPs.

Meanwhile, the Treasury started paying an allowance to ministers and parliamentary secretaries (but not to the Speaker or to the Leader of the Opposition) above their normal salary and equivalent to the new proposed level of MP honorarium that was never implemented in the case of all other MPs! This incredible administrative mess made it to the light of public scrutiny (by coincidence or design) at a time when the rise for the cost of living was set at just €1.16 – something that has nothing to do with the two decisions taken almost two years before.

Humiliating as it was, the decision to ask ministers and parliamentary secretaries to refund the difference between the actual honorarium and the proposed higher level of honorarium was the decent thing to do in the circumstances.

But the Prime Minister was left carrying the can. He and the Minister of Finance are politically responsible for this mess.

The least he can do now is to ferret out who led the administration into this mess and take disciplinary measures against whoever is administratively responsible for it.