WHEN the latest round of public sector increases are fully implemented permanent secretaries will end up earning half a million dollars more per year than Members of Parliament.

But the parliamentarians expect redress soon.

The formation of a Permanent Parliamentary Compensation Committee, which has been proposed in a report tabled in the House of Representatives Tuesday, is expected to have as its first task the job of correcting the anomaly.

The special committee, which looked at the pay and conditions of services of parliamentarians and tabled the report, said that it had been informed that as a result of the freeze on the wages of the parliamentarians in 2002 and the subsequent granting of a special adjustment to public-sector workers in October, 2005, an anomaly had developed between the salaries of the parliamentarians and those of the permanent secretaries, in favour of the civil servants.

Consequently, a proposal was made by the Cabinet for the salaries of parliamentarians to be adjusted in accordance with the relevant percentage increases granted to the civil servants under the new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU2) that took effect on April 1. The point was made, however, that this adjustment would not correct the existing differential, as the salary of a permanent secretary would move to approximately $4.5 million, in comparison to the $4 million per annum paid to cabinet ministers.

It also agreed that a Permanent Parliamentary Compensation Committee – which is one of the proposals in the report from the special select committee – in calculating the compensation of the parliamentarians, should also decide how to remove the anomaly, and over what period of time.

The committee has also approved the Cabinet proposal that the pay adjustments in the public sector, which have been agreed under MoU2 and which are effective as of April 1 this year, should be passed on to parliamentarians. But it rejected the suggestion that the second tranche of a major increase awarded to parliamentarians in 2002, which was frozen after a public outcry, should be paid.