Ending night calls is good for MPs

From next week members of the British parliament will begin to benefit from both a generous pay rise and shorter working hours. Neither will help to endear MPs to the public generally—and certainly not to general practitioners, who are currently up in arms about the government's expectation that they should continue to carry 24 hour responsibility for miserly rates of pay (see p 63).

The MPs' pay rise—at double the rate of inflation—is justified as a catching up exercise. The shorter hours have a more complex background, rooted in parliament's addiction to late nights. As an experiment the House of Commons has resolved to conclude its business by 10 pm each night, to sit on Wednesday mornings, and to stop sitting on …