Theresa May, now the only candidate for the Conservative leadership, has called for company boards to include both workers and consumer representatives. She has also called for shareholder votes on remuneration to be held annually and for votes on individual directors’ pay packages to be made binding. The TUC has long argued that including workers…
Before the Referendum – which seems like another era! – George Osborne said that post-Brexit he would introduce an emergency budget containing £30 billion of extra tax rises or spending cuts. Such a move would sharply escalate the austerity already shrouding much of the country, the impact of which doubtless contributed to the referendum result.…
George Osborne has cut corporation tax again. In 2020, the rate will go down to 17% – lower than the basic rate of income tax. Given the extent of the cuts being meted out to welfare spending and local government services, this choice – forecast to cost nearly £1 billion when it comes in –…
It is heartunions week – and perhaps one of the more surprising reasons to love unions is that they are good for productivity. I have an article on this in an e-pamphlet recently published by the IPA ‘Involvement and Productivity – The missing piece of the puzzle?’ Productivity has risen up the agenda in recent…
In contrast to recent budget speeches, which have included significant changes to pensions policy, the pensions announcements in this spending review do not herald any major new policy developments. However, the government has moved forwards on its plans to introduce pooling in investments for local government pension schemes. In addition, the consultation launched in the…
Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, has said that the UK’s shareholder model of corporate governance is holding back business investment and hurting economic growth. In a fascinating interview on Newsnight with Duncan Weldon (formerly TUC Senior Economist), he said that firms now return too much of their profits to their shareholders, and…
The TUC has published a new report on the pay of FTSE 100 remuneration committees members, who are responsible for setting company directors’ pay. Looking at total earnings from their different board positions, it finds that on average FTSE remuneration committee members are paid £441,383 per year – over 16 times average full-time earnings. The report…
The Chancellor claimed that the Autumn Statement was a slight fiscal tightening – in other words, that predicted income resulting from the policies announced would slightly exceed predicted expenditure. I blogged yesterday about the considerable uncertainty surrounding the budget contribution the Chancellor is counting on from measures on corporate tax avoidance, profit shifting and corporation…
The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) notes that the ‘giveaways’ and the ‘takeaways’ in the Autumn Statement roughly balance out. A huge proportion of the so-called ‘takeaways’ – ie, that will generate net income for government revenues – stem from measures to tackle corporate tax avoidance and profit-shifting and proposals to prevent banks from using…
Britain’s top directors are paid too much in relation to their own staff. That’s one of the conclusions of Executive Excess, a new TUC report that will be launched tomorrow. The highest ratio between the pay of a top company director and average employee’s pay at the same company is 1,607:1. At the other end…