Meanwhile, directors of Britain’s top FTSE 100 companies’ pension pots are worth an average of £3.9 million, according to the TUC’s annual PensionsWatch survey.
In a separate survey of executive pay, compiled by Income Data Services for the High Pay Commission, researchers found that even though savers’ share portfolios – and those of pension funds – have seen their returns shrink or disappear in a volatile stock market, the average pay for a FTSE chief executive rose from £3.09 million to £4.45 million.
The research found that the greatest gains in executive remuneration occurred over the past decade as directors saw their average annual bonuses jump by 187 per cent. In 2002, directors’ bonuses were on average 48 per cent of salary, but by 2010 they had jumped to 90 per cent of salary while salaries themselves rose by 63 per cent in the intervening years.
Ordinary employees, on average, saw annual wage increases of 2.2 per cent. In 2010, against inflation of 4.8 per cent, this meant a real terms drop in income for anyone outside golden circle boardrooms.
The TUC, ahead of next week’s conference in London – in which the issue of Government assaults on public sector pensions is expected to be a dominant topic – analysed the pension arrangements of 362 directors of FTSE 100 companies and concluded that the average transfer value (pension pot) of a director’s defined benefit pension is £3.91 million – providing an annual pension of £224,121.
The average director’s pension is
23 times the average occupational pension (£9,568), and 34 times bigger than the average public sector pension (£6,497) with the single biggest
pension pot in this year’s survey worth £21.5 million.
The average company contribution, of the companies surveyed, increased by £26,000 last year to reach £161,149 with beneficiaries able to enjoy them from the age of 60.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “This is the real pensions scandal in Britain today. Not content with trousering huge pay and bonuses, often without any link to their performance, top directors are awarding themselves seven-figure pensions while public sector workers are rightly furious about being told – by these same people – that their pensions of just a few thousand pounds are ‘gold-plated’ and unaffordable.”
