MLAs hike salaries for their staff, taking them above some doctors’ pay

The scale of the increase is such that the best paid workers in MLAs’ constituency offices – many of whom are family members of the MLA or party colleagues – will see the upper limit of their pay soar by 35% to £37,180.

That will take their pay higher than that of some registrar doctors working in hospitals whose pay scale begins at £31,997 a year and involves years of study, both in university and in the hospital, to get to that point where they are caring for acutely ill patients.

Yesterday Alan McQuillan, the former PSNI deputy chief constable who was one of the independent panel members who for most of the last decade set MLAs’ pay and expenses independently, questioned why staff in an MLA’s office taking phone calls, writing letters and similar jobs – and perhaps with no qualifications – would be paid more than a doctor.

Mr McQuillian told Talkback that it was an “amazing” pay hike and he could find no reference to any comparable pay deal anywhere in the public sector in Northern Ireland.

The change to the rules by MLAs will also mean an increase in expenses they can claim for their offices, mobile phones and multiple other areas of expenditure – which could total about £4 million a year.

People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll said the decision was “absolutely wrong” and “is exactly this kind of ‘gravy train’ politics that has left many thousands of people disillusioned with Stormont”.

TUV leader Jim Allister said that MLAs setting their own allowances “lacks the independent rigour the public rightly expects”.

But independent MLA Jim Wells argued that the move merely put staff on to the same footing as civil servants who work in the Assembly.

The Assembly told the News Letter that MLAs had examined other public sector roles – but not included the private sector, as Mr McQuillan’s panel had done – when deciding to set the new staff salaries and the changes would “bring MLA staff into broad alignment with them”.

Edwina Hegarty, a specialist infectious diseases and microbiology registrar working in the NHS in Northern Ireland, told the News Letter that she was not knowledgeable about what MLAs’ staff do and so “what they’re worth is not for me to say”.

However, she said that there was about seven years of work and vast expense involved before a doctor gets to be a registrar and that the nature of the job is that sometimes doctors will stay in work three hours after their finish time to care for a sick patient.

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