British Gas boss gets 44% rise to £2.4m
He’s the fat cat who lost 740,000 customers, put up prices and cut 4,000 jobs. Now there’s fury after...
THE boss of the parent company of British Gas received a 44 per cent pay boost last year – despite price rises, a customer exodus and thousands of job cuts.
Iain Conn, chief executive at Centrica, was paid a total of £2.42million – a rise of £740,000 – as a ‘reward for resilience’.
Union leaders condemned the pay packet as ‘eye-watering’ and ‘obscene’, with the news coming days after hundreds of UK call centre staff were warned their jobs are on the line.
The rise covers the 2018 calendar year when British Gas increased the price of standard variable tariffs for millions of customers twice within a few months, by the equivalent of around £100 a year.
There was a fall at the start of this year due to the energy price cap, but they went up again at the beginning of this month by the equivalent of £117 a year. Concern about spiralling prices saw 742,000 customers move away.
British Gas profits fell 19 per cent to £466million, yet parent firm Centrica enjoyed a 12 per cent rise, taking them up to £1.4billion. The company said the rise was at least partly the result of drastic cost-cutting which involves axing 4,000 jobs in an ‘efficiency drive’.
Further job losses are in the pipeline, including the closure of offices in Glasgow and Leeds, in a bid to save £500million in 2020. Unison’s Matt Lay, said: ‘It’s an eye-wateringly high salary. There can be no justification when the company is cutting back in such a big way.’
Hazel Nolan, of union GMB Scotland, said: ‘It is absolutely obscene. It represents everything going wrong in our labour market today. Under Iain Conn’s leadership this once great British institution is being run into the ground.’ Scottish-born Mr Conn, 56, and his family live in a sevenbedroom Buckinghamshire mansion with a pool. Among his prized possessions is a classic 1967 Mark 2 Jaguar, similar to the one in TV’s Inspector Morse.
He was paid £ 4million in 2016 as part of a golden hello to mark his arrival from oil giant BP. The thick- skinned boss put a framed copy of a headline calling him a ‘ fat cat’ on the wall of his office in Windsor.
It is not the first time excessive British Gas pay has provoked fury. In 1995, protesters took a 20- stone pig named Cedric to British Gas’s AGM to highlight the ‘snout in the trough’ £475,000 salary of chief executive Cedric Brown.
The details of Mr Conn’s earnings were revealed in the energy giant’s annual report, published yesterday. Chairman of the Centrica remuneration committee, Scott Wheway, signed off the payments. He said it had been ‘another challenging year’ – a reference to Theresa May’s price cap.
But he said: ‘Iain has shown significant resilience in the face of this challenge.’
Mr Conn’s base salary was £957,500, along with bonuses linked to profits, cash flow and efficiency targets. Centrica spokesman Tim Cowen said: ‘The chief executive volunteered to have his pension contribution reduced by 15 per cent, so his 2019 and future base remuneration will fall significantly.’
‘Snout in the trough’