FTSE exec pay surges: Your boss earns 183 times your pay

The huge discrepancy will reignite claims that “fat cat” executive wages are excessively high, and grossly out of proportion to those of their employees.

Only a quarter of the FTSE 100 firms are accredited to the Living Wage Foundation for paying the living wage, the report added.

The pay gap did not increase dramatically between 2014 and 2013, when chief executives earned 182 times the average workers pay, but the High Pay Centre points out that it is much bigger than in 2010, when CEOs earned 160 times more.

Deborah Hargreaves, director of the High Pay Centre, said: “Pay packages of this size go far beyond what is sensible or necessary to reward and inspire top executives”.

Their study revealed that the 10 highest-paid CEOs totted up over £156 million between them last year, and that’s an increase by nearly a whole £1 million since 2010.

Worryingly, despite shareholders having the power to voice their opposition to executive pay policy at company AGMs, the average vote against pay awards across the FTSE 100 was just 6.4%. It’s more likely that corporate governance structures… are riddled with glaring weaknesses and conflicts of interest’.

She told the BBC’s Today programme: “We’ve seen executive salaries pulling right away from the rest of society, creating this small elite of people that are just paid astronomically”.

Companies need to rebalance pay grades in order to fairly reward those who do most of the work, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said.

Rules put in place by the coalition government in 2013 mean companies have to to publish pay figures for their CEOs, as well as historical comparisons. But more transparency has not halted the rise in pay.

Executive pay is continuing to climb at the expense of ordinary workers, rising by over £800,000 in four years since the recession.

The High Pay Centre also recommended that companies publish their own figures on the difference in pay between executives and their workers.

The perk was branded “ridiculous” by the High Pay Centre.

Approximately 22 percent of WPP shareholders refused to back the Sorrell’s pay package at the annual general meeting in June. Ben van Beurden of Royal Dutch Shell got £19.5m and Erik Engstrom of Reed Elsevier (now known as RELX) received £16.2m.