Fatcats whose perks add up to £11m

THE bosses of Britain’s biggest firms are being handed millions of pounds in perks to allow them to pay for school fees, move house, and even use private jets for personal trips.

A Daily Mail investigation has laid bare the handouts – worth almost £11million last year alone.

Some of the biggest names in the FTSE 100 also get extravagant extras that in some cases average workers would take more than a decade to earn. This is despite the typical pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive now being around £4.5million a year.

They include the chief executive of Tesco, Dave Lewis, who was handed £142,000 to help him move around 35 miles from London to be nearer to the company’s head office in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. This was doled out even though the commute is around an hour, houses are a quarter of the price and Mr Lewis, 52, earned £4.2million last year.

The chief executive of Argos, John Rogers, 48, who made £1.6million last year, also got £42,647 in accommodation costs and a £6,500 travel allowance because he frequently had to visit Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire from his home in Surrey. John Pettigrew, 48, chief executive of National Grid, was given £497,000 of benefits as part of his £4.7million pay packet, the bulk of which was to help him move the 90 miles from Warwick to London.

And the chief executive of Carnival, which owns P&O Cruises, can get up to £155,000 to use the company’s Gulfstream G650 private jet.

Arnold Donald, 62, can use the jet for up to 30 hours a year, and last year racked up a bill of £76,000. Mr Donald, a married father of three, made £7.4million last year.

Stefan Stern, of think tank the High Pay Centre, said: ‘These deals add insult to injury.

‘They add to the sense there’s one rule for the City elite and another for everyone else.’

Argos said: ‘As part of his role, John [Rogers] is required to spend a considerable amount of time each week away from home. The accommodation and travel costs associated with this are business expenses, rather than perks for personal gain.’

National Grid said: ‘In keeping with our relocation policy, the company reimbursed [Mr Pettigrew] for expenses related to the relocation.’

Carnival said Mr Donald had to reimburse the company for any use of the private jet over the £155,000 a year threshold.

‘These deals add insult to injury’