A pay rise for MPs – and a really big one for Sir Oliver Dowden

How much money is it appropriate for an MP to earn while he continues to sit in the House of Commons? How much of his time can he reasonably devote to outside work? Does it matter that this MP is spending half of his time working for financial companies and more than a week per month working for a foreign firm?

We don’t have good answers to these questions. It’s all permitted under the rules and the MP in question, The Right Hon. Sir Oliver Dowden KCE CBE, scrupulously declares everything. What do you think? Leave a comment.

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background — Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

We were reminded to return to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, almost a year after our last visit, by the news that MPs are to receive one of their regular big pay increases. UK MPs, we learn, are “dealing with higher levels of complex casework, and abuse and intimidation” so they must have a pay rise. A pay rise of 3.5% plus a 1.5% ‘benchmarking adjustment’, in fact, bringing the base salary for an MP to £98,599 per year, starting in April (by the end of this Parliament they’ll be earning £110,000/year).

Of course there are some MPs who’ll barely notice. Sir Oliver Dowden KCB CBE, for instance, whose annual income is currently running at about £420,000 per year (including that boosted MP’s salary, less than a quarter of his annual income).

Most of Sir Oliver’s income, these days, comes from three sources:

Employer	Business	Days/month	Monthly salary
Francisco Partners Management	American investment firm	7	£11,667
Pierce Protocols	Art market	2	£10,000
Caxton Associates	Hedge fund	1	£5,000
		10	£26,667

In all three cases, Sir Oliver’s function is described in vague terms as ‘advisory’. He’s paid for varying amounts of advice: for Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based tech investment firm, it’s currently seven days per month. For Pierce Protocols, a London-based art services firm that runs an art investment marketplace under the Heni.com brand, it’s two days per month and for Caxton Associates it’s one – adding up to a total of ten working days per month.

We know Sir Oliver to be a very hard-working MP, certainly not one to shirk his duties as a member of Parliament, but should his constituents be concerned that he’s now essentially a part-timer?

The UK Parliament is famous for the usefulness and accessibility of its web site. It’s a paragon of transparency and accessibility, admired around the world. They win awards for it. For some reason this doesn’t apply to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests which, unaccountably, is still presented as a Byzantine maze of PDFs, with no way to organise or compare information. It’s all manual. Funny that.
More about Caxton Associates – an interesting firm that was also closely involved in the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss in this earlier post.
Here are part one and part two of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.

The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part three