Now is the wrong time to tackle rising boardroom pay

The average FTSE 100 chief executive earned £3.5 million last year — 117 times the £29,574 pay of the average full-time UK worker, according to new figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Other sources tell us that at the last count, 54 of those FTSE 100 chiefs were British, 21 held other EU passports, nine were Americans and 16 from the rest of the world.

‘So what?’ I hear you ask. These are global companies competing in a global market for management talent. Has not the average FTSE 100 chief’s pay actually fallen from £5.4 million since 2015, while UK wage rates have been rising this year at their fastest since the financial crisis? And aren’t we still miles behind the US, where the comparable S&P 500 top-dog makes $14.5 million (£11.8 million), at a multiple of 279 times average US earnings, which are only fractionally higher than ours? Maybe the problem of what Theresa May called ‘abuses and excess in the boardroom’, if it’s a real problem, is going away of its own accord.