London accounts for around 50% of qualified lawyers in England and Wales (i.e solicitors and barristers). At anywhere half-decent in London, doing commercial or corporate work, the absolute minimum starting salary for a newly qualified solicitor is about £55K.

Some firms double that, but expect your heart and soul in return. By 3 years post-qualification, if you are earning less than £75K, you are doing something wrong. At the commerical bar, even in Leeds and Manchester, you can exceed £100K in your first year out of pupillage if you are good and in the right chambers. But, earnings wise, this really is the legal equivalent of the Premier League.

Note I am talking about people who are formally legally qualified, not just someone who has left uni with a law degree and got a job as a paralegal at the local personal injury sweat-shop.



I guess it's the perks of the job. Most people in professional or management roles will have such benefits, albeit perhaps not to the same level.

Unfortunately thats a very naive opinion, if you think that a senior manager of a decent sized company can slip his home electricity bill into the pile of invoices on Maureen-in-accounts desk in the expectation that it will be paid with no questions asked, or that they will receive a meal allowance when working at their desk, or that they can employ members of their own family at twice the minimum wage in spurious jobs then you are very wrong.

Even if your company provide you with a car for business and personal use they have to declare it to HMRC and your tax code is lowered to reflect the benefit in kind, you can even be taxed as a benefit in kind if your employer provides you with free parking for the car and any other kind of expenses that you claim of any description have to be proven with receipts and properly recorded so as not to attract further benefit in kind penalties.

There are no perks outside of Westminster like the perks that MPs grant themselves.

Interesting to see that Sir Ian Kennedy claims "Ipsa had saved the public more than £35m since 2010." Maybe we really should be grateful to the old bill, after all just think of the £bns they must save the country by preventing us all from robbing ourselves blind.

This is the best and most sensible post on this thread so far. £70k - 80k a year is not excessive in relation to the position of responsibility and power that MP's hold and the work they generally carry on. Even in the public sector you would expect senior officiers in local authorities to be earning more. The merits and performance of specific MPs in another matter and that's up to the electorate to decide on.

The whole p1ss take with expenses came about because for years and years we didn't have a proper system that paid MPs effectively, and pay rises were seen as politically unpalatable, so instead a regime of "expenses" built up which then became misused and ultimately outright abused by some. This reform is entirely sensible, the problem is the stupidity of the knee-jerkers who don't look at this clearly and instead fixate on one aspect (the base salary).

There is also the public's general dislike of paying for politicians at any level whilst paradoxically expecting politicians to be there to do the things they want. The consequences of refusing to pay sensibly effectively narrows down the field of candidates, so you end up with people who are already rich, or people who are bankrolled by interests. This impacts all parts of the political spectrum whether it is people being bunged by lobbyists or being funded by trade unions, these people end up in hock to the respective special interests paying them (now you might personally agree with some of those special interests, but that's a different issue to whether they should have politicians in their pockets).

In terms of restricting freedom of employment for MPs, this I'm not sure of because it's tricky, I think there is merit in banning MPs from taking personal contributions from outside organisations whether it's lobbyists, campaign groups, unions, private companies and even private individuals but there would need to be a convention on ring fenced fund raising for election purposes otherwise genuine independent candidates would suffer. I'd also ban them from directorships of companies. But then what would you do about other income sources? If someone owns a business, you can make them step down as a director but you cannot force them to sell it (they'd just move the directorship to another family member etc), if someone has written a book you cannot stop royalties from coming etc... These are real world issues.

The difference being that one example created the party that it funds. The other did not.