Excessively low pay and levels of executive pay that have grown beyond financial justification are complex matters that do not have a single solution. However, our proposals include:

All sectors

• Encouraging and incentivising employers to pay the Living Wage to staff and on-site contractors.
• Mandatory reporting of top-to-bottom (as well as top-to-median) pay ratios, and an expectation that policies on low-paid staff and contractors will be published.

Public sector

• Use of public sector purchasing power to reduce the costs of contractors’ pay gaps and low-pay practices that are met through benefits by the taxpayer. The growing proportion of public services delivered by private providers makes this increasingly relevant.
• Requiring public agencies to publish assessments of the cost to taxpayers of below-living-wage employment related to major outsourced contracts.
• Requiring public sector pension funds to publish a policy on remuneration, and to vote on remuneration reports at investee company AGMs.

Remuneration committees

• Widening the composition of remuneration committees to include employees (who are more likely to have a longer term perspective and to require proper justifications for high executive pay).
• Widening the agenda of remuneration committees (to discourage the idea that executive pay and performance is the only lever in company performance).
• Review the role of remuneration consultants, in order to ensure that their selection and recommendations reflect the best interests of the company and are open to proper accountability.

Investors

• Measures to encourage investor assertiveness, by making investors and companies more transparent and remuneration votes binding.

More details of our policy proposals can be found in our A Third of a Percent and our briefing on Policies for the Good Company

A selection of our responses to Government and Opposition policy consultations

• Our response to Vince Cable’s announcements on executive pay – 23rd January 2012 (View PDF)

• One Society’s response to the BIS consultation on the Future of Narrative Reporting (View PDF) and discussion paper on Executive Remuneration (View PDF). You can also read a briefing of our responses to both reports (View PDF).

• One Society’s response to the final report of the Hutton Review of Fair Pay in the Public Sector. View PDF.

• One Society’s response to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills call for evidence – ‘A Long Term Focus for Corporate Britain‘, which asked important questions about rising income inequality in UK business. View PDF.