Good news, bad news: Nicholas Soames MP (Conservative)

Good news: the Conservative MP for Mid-Sussex has more than halved the number of outside jobs he does in addition to being an MP.

Bad news: he’s still doing three, paying over £350,000 per year in total.

(Back in December 2005, he had seven outside jobs, but payment for them did not have to be disclosed.)

Certainly can’t be said the jobs are badly paid. They bring in for him over £220,000 which, allowing for tax, means a gross pay of over £350,000 (as his MP salary will have taken up tax allowances and put him in in the top tax band).

He gets that for working approaching a day and a half a week on average. Even in Mid-Sussex, that’s a pretty good rate of pay… but given how extremely busy many MPs are, there’s an obvious question about how he finds the time to do the outside jobs – or indeed whether it’s right for an MP to work on that scale and for that level of pay in addition to being an MP.

There certainly are benefits to MPs having outside knowledge and experience and that can extend to them fulfilling roles like trustee of a local charity. However, the number of hours and scale of pay in Nicholas Soames’s case are of quite another order.

He has had to repay £1,345.55 following the Legg inquiry and was one of the 19 Conservative MPs to have voted against MPs having to declare the details of their outside earnings in 2009.

Fitting the pattern identified by Mark Thompson that MPs in safer seats are more likely to have controversial expense claims, Nicholas Soames’s constituency has been in Conservative hands since 1910, though that is something Serena Tierney is working hard to change.

Note: Nicholas Soames’s pay and hours varies a little during the year, but during the second half of 2009 worked out at an annualised rate of £36,581.78 for Aegis, £25,894.22 for MMC and £100,000 for Intrepid Capital Partners. This is the net income he earns from the jobs, so the gross salary (the figure usually quoted when talking about salaries) is higher than this. On the basis that his income tax allowances are used up via his MP’s salary already, to receive that net income when paying 40% tax on it, the gross income has to be over £350,000. The number of hours was equivalent to annual total of 506 hours, or 10.5 hours a week for a 48 week working year.