Ten FTSE 100 leaders enjoyed combined pay rises worth nearly £100m last year, including a sixfold increase for Tony Pidgley, chairman of housing group Berkeley Homes.
The figures drew fire from former business minister Vince Cable, trade union officials and excess pay campaigners, who pointed to the more modest pay increases handed to ordinary workers.
The largest increase in terms of monetary value went to Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of global advertising group WPP, who experienced a shareholder revolt over his bumper pay deal this week.
Sorrell’s remuneration leapt from £42.7m to £70.4m last year, a 65% increase he defended by saying he reinvests the cash in WPP, which he founded.
The biggest rise in percentage terms went to Berkeley Homes founder-chairman Tony Pidgley, whose total deal soared from £3.8m in 2014 to £23.3m in 2015, a rise of 520%, courtesy of a new bonus scheme.
After Pidgley, Flemming Ornskov, the chief executive of medical group Shire, was handed the second-largest percentage rise, a near sixfold increase from £2.5m to £14.1m.
The third largest rise was awarded to Sky’s Jeremy Darroch, who more than trebled his pay to £16.9m, followed by Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, who more than doubled his package to just under £4.9m.
Seven of the top 10 saw their total pay packet at least double from one year to the next.
The increases compare with the 2.9% growth in wages for the average UK worker reported in September last year, when the figure hit a six-year high.
Cable, who introduced binding shareholder votes on executive pay and the standardised single figure for chief executives’ pay, said remuneration remained a “toxic issue”.
He said the measures he introduced could only work “if shareholders have the inclination to argue back, which they won’t if you have a company dominated by one individual like Berkeley Homes or Sorrell’s outfit which he built up as a private company”.
Cable, who failed in a bid to force companies to publish the ratio of their lowest paid staff to the highest, said firms should be required to consult employees about executive pay.
Trade union officials backed calls for employees to be given a role in setting executive remuneration levels.
“These are huge increases on already excessive salaries,” said Paul Nowak, deputy general secretary of the TUC.
“When workers see only modest increases in their pay packets, it is particularly galling to see multimillionaires’ pay skyrocket.”
“But complaining won’t solve this problem. Ordinary workers need to be included on executive pay committees to add some common sense and reality to boardroom pay.”
Stefan Stern, director of the High Pay Centre, said the increases showed there was a case for revisiting the “powerful” idea of forcing firms to publish the ratio between executive remuneration and pay on the factory floor.
“The message employees are getting from the top is that times are tough and they have to exercise restraint and manage costs in a competitive world.
“Then they look up from their work and see what people at the top are getting. The restraint they’ve been urged to display themselves is badly lacking.
“We think pay ratios are something that ought to be embraced.”
Other notable recipients of significant pay rises include Ross McEwan, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, which is still 72% owned by the government after its 2009 bailout.
His remuneration more than doubled to £3.78m for a year in which the bank reported its eighth straight annual loss, of nearly £2bn.
Reckitt Benckiser, the firm behind products such as Nurofen and Cillit Bang, nearly doubled boss Rakesh Kapoor’s deal to £23m thanks to a bonus scheme but the 81.5% rise only put him eighth place in percentage terms.
AstraZeneca and Aviva pointed out that their pay figures for 2015 were inflated by bonuses that paid out for the first time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recipients of the biggest rises earn huge multiples of what the staff they employ earn, in some cases several hundreds of times more.
Sorrell’s £70.4m deal means he earns more than 1,300 times the average WPP employee wage of £53,251, based on company data showing it has 124,930 staff and total staff costs, including pensions and social security, of £6.65bn.
And the 34,700 staff at Reckitt Benckiser earn an average £33,372, meaning 695 of them would have to club together to match chief executive Rakesh Kapoor’s 2015 pay deal.
•Additional reporting by Darya Luganskaya
• This article was amended on 13 June 2016 to correct a statement from Stefan Stern about executive pay.
