Talk about a bounce back. The UK’s biggest companies raised billions of pounds and cut billions of costs during the pandemic, producing bountiful profits last year. Shareholders and management shared in the spoils — ￡153bn worth of adjusted net profits for the FTSE 100 — via raised dividends, buybacks and incentive payments. Labour has not done so well.
Research from Deloitte shows FTSE 100 bosses pocketed a median ￡3.6mn last year, in line with the pre-Covid levels of 2018. Their pay has increased as a multiple of worker remuneration. The gap, measuring the median chief executive against their median employee, rose from 75:1 in 2019 to 81:1 last year.
Workers had previously been enjoying a brief narrowing of this differential. Based on the nearly 70 companies that reported in the first quarter of this year, the median pay gap has almost doubled to 63 times compared with unusually low levels in 2021, according to the High Pay Centre, a left-leaning think-tank.