Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City Editor and is the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his weekly City AM column. This week he tackle s executive pay, Rightmove subs and firm YNAP window-shopping Who says work doesn’t pay? That’s not been the case in the last year or so for the bosses of the UK’s biggest companies – and even more so for those at the top end of the FTSE-100. There was the usual, predictable hand-wringing from the High Pay Centre when it published data in August showing that median pay for FTSE-100 chief executives rose by 3 per cent in 2023 from £4.
1m to £4.19m. Those numbers, though, disguise another intriguing nugget: Farient Advisors, a boardroom remuneration consulting firm, has crunched the data and concluded that chief executives of FTSE-30 companies received significantly bigger pay hikes than their peers.
Last year, the bosses of companies such as HSBC, Shell and London Stock Exchange Group soared by an average of 40 per cent to just over £7m. In part, this was due to the 2021-23 long-term incentive plan cycle, which resulted in larger vesting quantums because of the uncertain period in which stock was granted during the first half of the pandemic. The lower stock prices at which share awards were made triggered larger-than-usual payouts three years later, Farient found, reducing the gap between the top third of the FTSE-100 and the S&P 500.
However, the resumption of more precisely calculated stock grants in the period since Covid-19 p.