« Put Belfast on the Board | Northern Ireland Smoking Ban Takes Effect » |
The Cost of Stormont
It has emerged that MLAs are to get £70k a year on top of their salaries in the form of expenses ("expenses that allow the MLAs to employ people, in some cases close relatives, to help carry out their constituency work"). Just before devolution was restored, Peter Hain increased these allowances by 45% to £70k a year!
Prompted by this I've done a little bit of digging and tried to work out exactly what the farce at Stormont is going to cost us each year. Apart from the extra allowance for committee chairs which I had to estimate, the following figures represent the cost of bribing our politicians to doing their jobs.
Job | Allowance/Salary | Num. of Positions | Cost |
---|---|---|---|
MLA Salary | £41,321 | 108 | £4,462,668 |
MLA Expenses | £70,000 | 108 | £7,560,000 |
Committee Chair | £10,000 | 10 | £100,000 |
Minister | £36,241 | 10 | £362,410 |
First/Deputy First Minister | £69,862 | 2 | £139,724 |
OFMDFM Jr. Ministers | £18,800 | 2 | £37,600 |
Speaker | £17,033 | 1 | £17,033 |
Total | £12,679,435 |
Follow up:
What's interesting is that if each constituency elected 4 MLAs instead of 6, and the government had 8 departments instead of 10, we'd be looking at somewhere around £8½ million.
So, I ask, is it all worth it?
Most of the figures come from gmtv.teo.ie/pdf/stormont.pdf although the MLA salaries were grabbed from www.niassembly.gov.uk/members/expenses/members_expenses6.htm which is actually discussing a reduction in the basic salary for MLAs while the assembly was dissolved. I can't recall hearing that the salary itself has changed since this so the figure included in the calculation is this previous assembly salary, although knowing our overlords they've probably awarded themselves a pay-increase too [Edit: apparently not just yet]. I'm happy to be corrected if anyone can point to more accurate figures, particularly for committee chairs.