,
Labour’s Shadow Paymaster General, speaking in
the House of Commons for Labour’s Urgent Question on severance
pay for government ministers, said:
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for granting this Urgent
Question, and I do welcome the fact that there is a minister to
respond.
In the middle of a cost of living crisis, with families
struggling to make ends meet and get to the end of each month,
the British public will be rightly watching this distracted
Government with disgust.
Too busy infighting to provide real solutions.
Adding insult to injury, thousands of pounds of their hard-earned
taxes will be handed out to former ministers.
By my reckoning, a quarter of a million pounds in severance pay
for those ministers who haven't been reinstated.
Five former secretaries of state will receive over £16,000 each.
Including the former Secretary of State for Education who was in
post for 36 hours and is due to receive close to the annual
starting salary for a teaching assistant, the annual starting
salary.
The unprecedented wave of resignations is a unique case, the
avalanche of abdications, makes this a unique case.
The vast majority were not sackings or forced resignations.
Their departures were caused entirely by a discredited prime
minister clinging to office, and a Conservative Party unwilling
to deal with it.
Now our constituents are forced to foot the bill, paying for this
government’s chaos yet again.
So I ask the minister, in conclusion:
What is the exact cost of these resignations to the taxpayer?
Have any payments already been made to former ministers? If so,
how much and who?
Will ministers receive a severance in a one-off payment to their
bank account?
How does this payment represent good value for money to the
public?
And what arrangements are there to ensure that they can be
waived, as she identified, and returned to the Treasury?
Former ministers need to look themselves in the mirror and decide
if their constituents would wish them to accept this payment.
And this whole government must tell us if they can really defend
this use of our money.
Thank you.
