The bosses of the UK’s 100 biggest listed companies collected an average £500,000 pay rise last year, while many of the millions of people working for them saw their pay growth fail to keep up with soaring inflation.
FTSE 100 chief executives received an average pay rise of 16% last year, taking their median pay to £3.9m, up from £3.4m in 2021, according to research by the High Pay Centre thinktank published on Tuesday.
Pascal Soriot, the CEO of the drug company AstraZeneca, was the highest paid last year, collecting £15.3m, up from £13.9m the previous year. Charles Woodburn, the boss of the arms manufacturer BAE Systems, was the second highest paid, collecting £10.7m. In third place was Albert Manifold, the leader of the building supplies company CRH, who was paid £10.4m.
The bosses of the oil and gas companies BP and Shell were also among the top earners. The BP chief executive, Bernard Looney, was paid just over £10m, while Shell’s former CEO Ben van Beurden was paid £9.7m.
The median FTSE 100 CEO is now paid 118 times the median UK full-time worker, an increase from 108 times in 2021 and 79 times in 2020. The average salary for full-time UK workers is £33,000, according to Office for National Statistics figures.
Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, said: “At a time when so many households are struggling with living costs, an economic model that prioritises a half-a-million-pound pay rise for executives who are already multimillionaires is surely going wrong somewhere.
“How major employers distribute the wealth that their workforce creates has a big impact on people’s living standards. We need to give workers more voice on company boards, strengthen trade union rights and enable low- and middle- income earners to get a fairer share in relation to those at the top.”
CEO pay had fallen slightly during the coronavirus pandemic but is now back up to the highest since 2017, when it hit £3.97m on average for FTSE 100 bosses.
Emma Walmsley, the chief executive of GSK, was the only woman to feature in the top 10 highest-paid bosses in the FTSE 100, which has only nine female CEOs. Walmsley was paid £8.45m last year.
The average CEO makes more in less than three days than the average UK worker makes in a year. According to analysis by the GMB trade union, it would take a 999 ambulance call handler almost 150 years to match the pay of the average chief executive.
Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said: “While millions of families have seen their budgets shredded by the cost of living crisis, City directors have enjoyed bumper pay rises.
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“This is why workers must be given seats on company boards to inject some much-needed common sense and restraint. We need an economy that delivers better living standards for all – not just those at the top.
“But under the Tories, Britain has become a land of gross extremes. As households across the country have struggled to put food on the table, sales of Porsches have hit record levels.”
Almost three-quarters (74%) of FTSE 100 companies paid their CEO a long-term incentive plan (Ltip) bonus, up from 71% in 2021. The average Ltip bonus increased to £1.8m, from £1.5m a year earlier.
Among the wider FTSE 250 companies, average CEO pay was £1.8m, up slightly on £1.7m a year earlier.
