Make firms pay for their bosses’ huge pension gains

FIRMS which give their boss a lucrative pension while ordinary staff miss out should pay more tax, a former minister has said.

At present all companies can limit tax bills by writing off pension payments as an expense.

But Baroness Ros Altmann has argued that this should not apply unless ordinary staff get the same as senior executives.

In some cases it would land firms with bills running to tens of millions of pounds. It comes after the Mail revealed how some of Britain’s biggest companies have far more lucrative pension schemes for their chief executives than regular staff.

At Lloyds, boss Antonio HortaOsorio is given £565,000 towards his pension, 46pc of his £1.2m annual salary. Ordinary staff get 13pc at most, and only if they put away 5pc of their salary.

Bosses such as Horta-Osorio are given the money as an upfront cash payment while workers’ funds are locked away for decades until retirement.

Critics argue that this makes executives’ pension payments more like a secret top-up to their pay. Altmann, pensions minister from 2015 to 2016, said: ‘For bosses, this money just ends up being pay disguised as a pension. For everyone else the terms are much, much less generous – and another example of the huge disparity between bosses and ordinary workers.’

Other FTSE 100 firms with hugely generous pension schemes for bosses include builder CRH, which gave boss Albert Manifold £593,000 or 47pc of his annual salary in 2017.

Bill Winters, head of Standard Chartered bank, received £ 460,000, or 40pc. Rakesh Kapoor, former head of consumer goods titan Reckitt Benckiser, got £281,000, or 30pc. And Marco Gobbetti, boss of fashion firm Burberry, was handed £245,000, or 30pc.

Sir Steve Webb, another former pensions minister, said: ‘We need structures so people at the top of the business have an incentive to care about provision for the bulk of their workforce, and we don’t have that.’