Help to Buy fat cat’s £1m... in three days
A HOUSEBUILDING boss given a staggering £132 million bonus after his firm made vast profits from the Help to Buy scheme saw the payout swell by another £1 million in just three days last week.
Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of Persimmon, receives the first £53 million chunk of the bonus today and has now learned he will pocket the extra £1 million after a rise in Persimmon’s share value. Critics argue his bonus has been massively inflated by Help to Buy – the Government scheme launched in 2013 which uses taxpayers’ money to help first-time buyers get on the housing ladder.
More than 50 per cent of Persimmon’s sales are through Help to Buy. Its share price has soared by more than 200 per cent since 2013. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable has branded Fairburn’s bonus ‘obscene’, while former Tory Minister Steve Norris said it was ‘hard-pressed taxpayers’ who had made Fairburn and other housebuilding bosses so rich.
Polly Neate, chief executive of homeless charity Shelter, meanwhile, said housebuilding companies were ‘taking huge profits from a housing crisis hurting millions’. The Mail on Sunday revealed in November that Fairburn, 51, who left school at 17 to go into construction, was to collect the first part of his huge bonus this month. The coverage prompted the resignations of two Persimmon directors, including chairman Nicholas Wrigley, who is understood to have asked Fairburn to give some of his bonus to a housing charity.