Mr. Michael Howard:

I will return to the point about expense-related allowances. The allowances that are paid evolved when the associations were established just as pay negotiation was becoming centralised. Once the associations came into that system they were required to sign up to national pay agreements which provided that only small claims could be submitted. So the only avenue open to the associations to advance a claim if they had a group of people was to make a small claim which was ring-fenced for that group. On the management side, we were under what I would call the tyranny of repercussive effects. If the associations brought to our attention a particular group with a problem we dealt only with that particular group and we isolated it. It was a cost-containing strategy by management. The price we may have paid for it was administrative complexity, but the alternative - if one had allowances of general application and did something that could spread beyond our own domain - could have set off very expensive repercussive effects. Therefore there was a rational managerial strategy to contain costs but we paid a price for it.

Part of the difficulty is that, for policy reasons, we cannot pay overtime. That is a fundamental and long-standing policy. It is in the nature of military service that such personnel have to be available for service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Given that they are in military service, they are exempted from the Working Time Directive and health and safety legislation. When they came in with particular groups, many of whom genuinely had merit, we had to deal with them by way of allowance because it was the only instrument available. In addition, if we had sought to deal with it under basic pay the repercussions would have been serious and probably against the public interest in the long term.

The Deputy is right in that the system we have now evolved is complex. In the medium term there is scope for amalgamation, but I would caution that it is not necessarily going to give a big return in terms of money. That is because many of these allowances do not apply to many people.