Executive pay ‘continuing to rise’

Reward and pay is continuing to increase among executives in the UK, new research has found.

A poll carried out by the Guardian has revealed that full and part-time directors of FTSE 100 companies shared between them more than £1 billion, as their basic salaries increased by ten per cent in the year.

This was despite the fact that the firms also witnessed a loss of almost a third of the value of their value as the recession hit the business sector.

And while pay freezes were being experienced by employees and redundancy programmes were imposed, the Guardian states that directors’ basic pay rose at double the rate of inflation.

The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Vince Cable said: "The Guardian’s analysis shows the breathtaking cynicism involved in a lot of executive pay deals, which are unrelated to either personal or corporate performance."

Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Workwise UK, recently stated that employers planning to introduce pay freezes need to demonstrate the benefits of such action across the board.