The average FTSE 100 CEO is now paid around 190 times the wages of the average worker, and around 400 times that of someone earning the minimum wage. Executive pay has become divorced from reality, disconnected from performance and totally detached from the pay of other employees. Millionaire bosses are treated as irreplaceable talent, the rest of us are often dismissed as a cost to be reduced. That needs to change.

That’s why The Equality Trust is asking you to sign our petition calling on the UK Government to introduce mandatory pay ratio reporting in the private sector immediately, and require businesses to reveal, and justify, the difference in pay between bosses and workers.

The Prime Minister has said: “I want to see more transparency, including the full disclosure of bonus targets and the publication of ‘pay multiple’ data: that is, the ratio between the CEO’s pay and the average company worker’s pay.” 

Given this, and the Government’s recent Green Paper consulting on corporate governance reform, we urgently need your signature to keep the pressure on.

If We’re Going To Fix It, We’re Going To Have To Measure It First 

Please ask everyone you know to sign as well.  Thank you. 

Dr Wanda Wyporska
Executive Director
The Equality Trust

The Petition

In the interests of transparency and fairness, we call on the UK Government to enact legislation requiring companies (those defined as being at least medium-sized in the Companies Act 2006) to report their highest-to-median pay ratios in their annual statutory accounts.

Thank you for signing this petition.

We will deliver it to Greg Clark MP: Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Please share this petition via Twitter and Facebook – thank you!

The Case for Pay Ratio Reporting

• Pay ratios are much more than a metric. They acknowledge that pay at the top is connected to pay for the rest of the workforce, and that the success of a company is a result of everyone’s hard work.
• The public sector already has to report pay ratios. It’s time the private sector, with its much larger pay gaps, followed suit.
• Mandatory gender pay gap reporting from April this year means companies will have to calculate median pay anyway, so pay ratio reporting will require little extra work.
• Other major world economies think pay ratio reporting is important: India already requires it and the US has adopted a rule that will require it too.

The full case for pay ratios as part of a comprehensive reform of corporate governance in the UK is set out in The Equality Trust’s submission to the Government’s recent Green Paper.