18% pay boom for top bosses

Britain's leading 100 bosses have collected pay rises of 18per cent, almost four times the national average.

Incomes Data Services has calculated that the basic salaries of chief executives in FTSE 100 companies leapt by an average of 14.8 per cent in the year to July. When bonuses are added, the annual growth rate surged to 18.3 per cent, taking the average FTSE 100 chief executive's pay to a total of more than £960,000.

The report suggests the pace of boardroom pay growth has picked up, despite Government warnings on pay restraint. John Monks, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said: "In such uncertain economic times, we need to see boardroom restraint." The single biggest gain among large firms was a 32per cent surge in average board salary at mobile phone giant Vodafone.

Among the 2,000 directors surveyed by IDS, one in four received a total pay rise of more than 25.1 per cent, mainly as a result of increases in bonus packages, rather than rises in basic pay.

The big gains were not limited to chief executives, however. Finance and other directors in the top 100 firms earned more than £570,000 on average and enjoyed pay growth in double digits. Similar gains, albeit from a generally smaller base, were also enjoyed in medium-sized FTSE 250 firms.

"Directors' pay will be under greater scrutiny than ever before," the report said. "Even more information on boardroom pay packages will have to be put into the public domain and remuneration committees are going to be much more accountable for their decisions."

The report also showed that a fifth of directors suffered a fall in earnings. And in a sign of the recent technology slump, the lowest executive salaries were in software and computer service companies.

In the oil and gas industry, top executive directors earned basic salaries almost three times as much as their tech-industry peers.

The average British income last year was £21,842, according to Government figures. Average pay growth in the year to July was 4.5per cent.