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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, MPs are set to receive an inflation busting 11% pay rise. Due after the general election it could take annual salaries to £74,000 or thereabouts but with a public sector pay freeze and voters still very angry about the expenses scandal, will many MPs be forced to turn it down? Well joining me from Guildford in Surrey is Conservative MP, Sir Peter Bottomley. Good to talk to you Sir Peter. Now you’ve been around for a while and seen these arguments swirl over the years, do you think a rise like this would be justified?

PETER BOTTOMLEY: Not during this parliament, it is only going to come into effect after the next general election when everyone knows what the terms will be. If you go back thirty years I can remember Enoch Powell saying he was aware that there were more candidates than there were positions so I suppose in theory the free market answer would be don’t MPs at all, put a tax of £10,000 a year on and when you get 650 candidates for 650 seats but people wouldn’t then be happy with the calibre of their MPs.

DM: Okay, a good argument but living in the real world, then you have got that whole other argument about where do they earn their money from and what would they get up to. Why is £74,000 too much? It sends out the wrong signals, because comparisons are done with MPs and representatives in other countries and this is the kind of figure that they get?

PETER BOTTOMLEY: Well some MPs in some countries get virtually nothing and they are expected to make it by corruption or favours. In some countries like Singapore they are not supposed to be corrupt and they get paid over a million dollars a year but I don't think that helps us very much. I think the real question is to recognise that the rich can be an MP, the poor can, the unemployed would find they were better off as an MP, someone with a working spouse is fine, someone who is very elderly with very few expenses could be an MP and probably a person of 21 could be an MP. The problem comes if a general practitioner in medicine said I’ll volunteer to be an MP for a parliament or two, how much of a reduction do you want her to take? If the head of large primary school becomes an MP, how much of a reduction should they take in their family’s standard of living? I think that’s the sensible way to ask it. Remember of course that from our members of the House of Commons and some of the Lords, you take people who are Ministers to run the health service with 1.4 million employees, to run the defence services, to run education, to look after culture, media and sport for that matter – do you want them all to people who set out in life to earn relatively little with the insecurity and expense that goes with being an MP? I think having an outside body giving a recommendation is sensible but the most sensible answer is to only say MPs get an increase not because of inflation but at the beginning of each parliament at roughly the right level.

DM: Okay, you have argued both sides of it, there is the politics of it and let’s stay with the politics of it, so how do you think all the parties will handle this? If this comes from an independent body aren’t MPs, backbench MPs, free to ignore the leadership if they say, as they seem to be saying, don’t take it?

PETER BOTTOMLEY: Well it is the other way round I think. It’s me who will say this is the wrong amount and the wrong time and that may be right as leader but the fact is that it was the leaders who set up this IPSA system, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, who were given the responsibility to set the level of pay and people can’t interfere with it. So the only way that MPs could overturn this is to defy their leaders and pass a law that says IPSA is abolished or it will be ignored. That’s impractical given the public interest and why it was set up in the first place. So I think we’re stuck. The recommendation from IPSA is that if they have got the time to come up with the recommendation which is recommended from halfway through 2015, when new MPs are elected but the other thing that is worth saying is that the at least my part of the Conservatives are wanting to reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons by 10%, that at least would pay for at least part of any increase that came into effect after the last election. Sadly there is a conspiracy between Labour and the Liberals to overturn that so we don’t have any new boundaries, we have unfair boundaries, an unnecessary number of MPs and it looks as if we are going to have an unpopular increase for MPs anyway.

DM: Okay Sir Peter, good to speak to you, thank you very much for sparing the time. Sir Peter Bottomley there.