Pay chief at ‘Mr £131m’ housebuilder doesn’t know average earnings of staff

ONE of the country’s biggest housebuilders was branded a ‘disgrace’ by a senior MP last night in a row over fat cat pay.

In a bruising encounter in Parliament, the chairman of Persimmon’s pay committee was told the £45million bonus handed to chief executive Jeff Fairburn last year was ‘egregious’.

Marion Sears faced humiliation when she was unable to tell MPs on the business committee what the firm’s average worker earned.

And she was condemned after she revealed that 97 per cent of Persimmon staff earn the real living wage, which campaigners say is necessary to live.

The national living wage – compulsory for workers aged 25 and over – is £7.83 an hour. The real living wage is £8.75 nationally and £10.20 in London.

Persimmon later revealed that its average worker was paid £35,600 – less than half the £75,714 Mrs Sears, 55, earned last year. Mr Fairburn earned 1,323 times the firm’s average wage.

Appearing before the business committee yesterday, Mrs Sears was asked what her boss was paid last year. She replied that it was Grilled: Marion Sears yesterday £675,000 – his basic salary – but was cut off by committee chairman Rachel Reeves, who wanted to know what his total pay was.

‘Oh, about £45million,’ said Mrs Sears. This is around £2million short of the real figure.

Mr Fairburn, 52, has been dubbed ‘Mr £131million’ over the potential size of the windfall he could have received through a bonus scheme agreed in 2012.

He has agreed to give up a chunk of the payout after a backlash but still received £44.9million of shares last year under the plan, taking his total pay for 2017 to £47.1million. He is in line for a payment worth around £35million next month.

Miss Reeves was incredulous when Mrs Sears was unable to state the firm’s average wage, saying: ‘Isn’t one of the reasons why people are unhappy about the £45million paid to Jeff Fairburn is because the success of the company reflects the work of everybody and in the case of Persimmon the Government’s Help to Buy scheme? So isn’t the pay of the average person in the organisation quite pertinent to the issue of pay at the top?’

Mrs Sears said: ‘Yes it is. But this is such a special case that it’s an irrelevant multiple.’

Miss Reeves shot back: ‘It might not be that irrelevant to somebody just doing an ordinary job at Persimmon.’

She added: ‘ You would have thought an organisation that can pay £45million to their chief executive might be able to afford to pay the living wage to everybody in their organisation, wouldn’t you?’

After the hearing, the MP tweeted: ‘ Answers from Persimmon a disgrace.’

She said later in a statement: ‘Executive pay at Persimmon is a tale of corporate greed and incompetent pay management, financed on the back of a taxpayer-funded housing scheme.’