Measure 1.05 — Recalibrating parliamentary staff budgets

Parliamentary staff funding buys scrutiny capacity, not a fringe benefit

The National Assembly’s 2026 budget includes €83.80 million for parliamentary staff funding, including associated payroll charges, and the centrally administered monthly allowance is €11,463 per member. Staff are hired by the individual deputy under private-law employment contracts. ^[1] A uniform 50% reduction therefore has to be tested against the work currently performed in Paris and constituencies: legislative preparation, casework, local representation, communications and scrutiny. A euro removed from the allowance is not a saving if the same expertise has to be rebuilt in permanent parliamentary services.

The more interesting design question is whether some support should be pooled. Legal, economic, data and policy-analysis functions can be organised partly at group or committee level while constituency and political work remains attached to members. The impact assessment should compare at least three models: a smaller individual allowance, partial pooling, and stronger non-partisan committee services. Each model needs a full-cost estimate and an assessment of whether members remain sufficiently independent of the executive and the civil service they are meant to scrutinise.

The Senate requires its own calculation rather than a copied Assembly ratio because its accounts and member-support arrangements are different. ^[2] The historical €85 million target can only be evaluated after consolidating both chambers and excluding savings already attributed to measures 1.01 or 1.02 if member numbers fall. The useful end metric is the cost of support for preserved parliamentary functions — legislation, scrutiny, evaluation and territorial work — rather than an arbitrary headcount reduction.

Reduce staff budgets without hollowing out analytical capacity

Parliamentary staff do not perform a single function. Some roles focus on constituency casework, others on drafting, amendments, scheduling, communications or specialist policy analysis. Halving the allowance without mapping those functions would therefore affect members and political groups very differently. The impact file should identify the minimum capacity required to process local requests and legislation, then test pooling models: shared legal teams, group-based analysts, central administrative support or stronger research services. Any expenditure recreated in those structures must be deducted from the headline saving. Only after that comparison can a new individual ceiling be evaluated rationally.

Pluralism is part of the calculation. Small groups and unaffiliated members have fewer economies of scale than large parties; an identical cut can therefore reduce their access to expertise more sharply. A common basic allocation combined with pooled specialist resources could be tested as an alternative. Annual reporting should show headcount, broad functional distribution, use of pooled teams and cost by support model. The objective is not to preserve every existing post, but to identify the support capacity Parliament must retain before turning a reduction in an allowance into a secured saving.

Cut staff budgets without weakening parliamentary challenge

Members' staff provide part of Parliament's capacity to read legislation, prepare amendments, handle constituency work and scrutinise government. Halving the budget therefore requires a functional map of what those teams actually do. Some tasks may be pooled within political groups or committees; others are inherently tied to the individual mandate. The impact assessment should separate repetitive administrative work, legal or budget expertise, constituent casework and territorial presence. A reform that removes expertise from legislators while leaving the executive's analytical capacity intact would create an institutional imbalance that does not appear in a simple payroll table. The National Assembly’s official briefing states that an MP currently has a monthly staff allowance of 11,463 euros and may recruit up to five assistants; the Assembly also publishes open-data listings of parliamentary staff, providing an additional basis for checking the real structure of teams. ^{[3] [4]}

Three architectures could be compared: a uniform reduction, partial pooling at group level, or a smaller individual allowance combined with a shared expert platform. Each option should be assessed for cost, staff capacity, effects on smaller groups and unaffiliated members, and continuity when staff leave. The chosen model should preserve a minimum degree of intellectual autonomy for every member. Net savings are defensible only if payroll reductions are not recreated elsewhere through more expensive central services or outsourced consultancy.

Common audit method: double-counting controls, transition costs and budget reconciliation are centralised in the versioned budget-methodology register. For measure 1.05, those rules apply only to the flows and risks documented on this page; no saving is booked without executed baseline spending, an identifiable base and transferred costs deducted.