I am aware of constituents' concerns regarding the vote in the House of Commons on 28 June, on a Labour Party amendment to the Queen's Speech which referred to lifting the public sector pay cap, and my vote against this amendment.

Firstly; Labour's amendment was not designed to help public sector workers, it was designed to grab headlines and bring down the Government. The cap is a financial policy and can therefore only be changed by the budget, so had this amendment been voted through, the public sector pay cap would still have been in place.

Furthermore, the part of the amendment which referred to lifting the cap offered no proposal for how much public sector pay should actually rise by, and did not consider any potential costs of the blanket rise it implied. However the Institute of Fiscal Studies expect this to cost £9.2 billion per year by 2020-21.

The Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that the pay freeze has protected 200,000 public sector jobs, enabling a continuity in vital services. However, I am assured that the Government are listening to calls for a change in policy, and to that end the independent public sector pay review bodies are currently working through proposals on pay to bring to the Government, and the Government will respond accordingly.

Indeed, recent events have shown that we are indebted to our frontline public sector workers, but this amendment was a political game from Labour. I do not think this is the best way to ensure fairness for public sector workers, and while pay has to be fair to our public servants, it must be fair to everyone who pays for them through their taxes too.

I am saddened by the impression some constituents were left with by the cheers as the Labour amendment to the Queen's Speech was defeated. If Labour's amendment had been passed (and it was crafted to be as difficult as possible to vote it down) it would have been taken as a vote of 'no confidence' in the Government. In normal language, that means that the Government would have fallen and another general election would have had to have been held. I hope though that you will understand that the cheers were not about defeating a proposal to increase public sector pay but about the Government establishing its right to exist at all.

Finally, I do not oppose giving our public sector workers a pay rise. There are MPs from all parties who are in favour of seeing the cap lifted, but this has to be worked through and properly costed. It is a matter for the budget which sets Government policy, and not a politically-loaded, detail-free amendment.