Cameron: Executive pay rises must match success

Monday, 9 January 2012 10:51 AM

Prime minister David Cameron tells BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show his views on executive pay:

"What I think is wrong is pay going up and up and up when it is not commensurate with the success companies are having.

"I'm in favour of people setting up great businesses in Britain, expanding those businesses in Britain, making lots of money when those businesses succeed in Britain.

"Government should not tell people what they are to be paid but where you have got a market failure – and to me this is a market failure – we saw between 1998 and 2010 the average pay of FTSE executives go up four times.

"Some people are worth £2 million because they have added masses of jobs, masses of investment, masses of growth.

"But where there was excessive growth of payment, unrelated to success, frankly ripping off the shareholder and the customer, and is crony capitalism and is wrong. It's also, and this is the key point, payments for failure.

"Big rewards when people fail make, I think, people's blood boil."

Tags:
• business
,
• city of london
,
• executive pay