The chief executives of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies have snared average pay increases of 23% in the past year, driven by record bonus payments, as most workers are battling for cost-of-living rises, according to research released on Monday.
Research by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) revealed CEO pay increased to £3.9m this year from £3.2m 12 months earlier.
The findings are bound to cause tensions between shareholders and executives as the annual general meeting season starts soon, said PwC’s executive compensation leader Andrew Page.
He said the awards would receive greater scrutiny from investors “particularly in the context of rising inflation and pay increases across the workforce”.
Most workers were struggling with a combination of spiralling inflation and rising interest rates, while companies were typically offering below-inflation pay increases of about 5-6% PwC found.
The proportion of CEOs with salary freezes dropped from 43% last year to 15% this year, showing a rebound from the Covid pandemic when many also took no bonuses.
On average, CEOs received 86% of the maximum possible bonus available to them, up from 58% last year, and above pre-Covid levels. Only 5% of bosses received no bonus in the 2021-22 financial year, down from 22% a year earlier.
Trades Union Congress general-secretary Frances O’Grady, CEO pay was “soaring while working people experience the biggest real wage falls in 20 years”.
“These unbalanced pay policies have seen the gap widen between workers and bosses this year, adding to the cost of living crisis.
Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com
