By Ned Simons - 10th March 2011
The large number of MPs on the government payroll is "deeply corrosive", a group of MPs has warned.
A report published todayby the public administration committee said that the number of ministers should be culled in order to stop the government bulldozing parliamentary scrutiny.
According to the committee there are currently 141 MPs, 22 per cent of the Commons, who hold some governmental post. This proportion is likely to rise once the number of MPs is cut from 650 to 600.
"This is deeply corrosive to the House of Commons primary role of acting as a check on the executive," the report warned
The Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 limits the total number of ministers at 109, but successive governments have gotten around this by appointing unpaid ministers.
The report also questions the existence of so many Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPS'), who while not ministers, are expected to vote with the government.
PPS' act as a conduit between ministers and backbench MPs. But the report questioned the need for so many amid concerns that the positions are often handed out simply to silence potential backbench rebels.
The committee recommended that one simple step the government should take immediately to limit this size of the payroll vote would be to limit the number of PPS' to one per secretary of state.
It estimates that if this was done it would result in 26 fewer MPs being on the payroll vote.
Conservative Bernard Jenkin, who chairs the committee, said the coalition needed to make sure that its constitutional reforms did not advantage the executive over the legislature.
"The number of MPs on the payroll in the House of Commons today is as high as ever, undermining the independence of Parliament," he said.
"Things will get worse if the so-called 'payroll vote' is not reduced in line with cuts in the size of the Commons."
Jenkin's committee also said that David Cameron's vision of a 'Big Society' should be viewed as a failure if the government fails to cut the number of ministers.
It argued that as more power is devolved down from Whitehall to local authorities and communities fewer ministers should be required to deliver services.
Yesterday Lib Dem backbencher Stephen Gilbertannounced he had turned down a PPS role in order that he be able to continue to vote against the coalition, following a similar decision by Tory MP Sarah Wollaston.
During the committee's evidence sessions leading up to the report, former Labour minister and successful political diarist Chris Mullinsaid that no minister of state needed a PPS.
"The one who attached to me in a clam-like fashion in the Foreign Office was a damn nuisance," he told MPs.
The reccomendations come as media reports suggest the short-lived Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury David Laws is about to return to government with a post in the Cabinet Office.
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