BRITAIN’S DEPUTY prime minister has pledged to crack down on levels of top executive compensation, saying public-sector workers facing pay cuts should not feel they are doing “all the heavy lifting”.

The coalition government is prepared to legislate if necessary in the new year to give shareholders a greater say over boardroom pay in the private sector, Nick Clegg told the BBC's Andrew Marrprogramme yesterday.

“Just as we have been quite tough on unsustainable and unaffordable things in the public sector, we now need to get tough on irresponsible behaviour of top remuneration of executives in the private sector,” he said.

“People should be well paid if they succeed. What I abhor is people who get paid bucket-loads of cash in difficult times for failing.”

The prime minister David Cameron has urged executives to show restraint on pay as the euro zone debt crisis saps growth, household incomes fall and government spending is being cut.

The independent High Pay Commission inquiry into executive pay concluded last month that the soaring earnings of top bankers were having a “corrosive” effect on the UK economy. Other research by Incomes Data Services found directors of the largest British companies saw their earnings jump by 49 per cent in the last financial year.

“I think we need to make sure that people in the public sector do not feel that they are doing all the heavy lifting,” Mr Clegg told the BBC, “that people who are in a sense living by completely different rules in the private sector are also held to account.”

He said the government wanted to break open the “closed shop” of remuneration committees and see more rank-and-file employees serve on them. Shareholders were too often given a “blizzard of information” about pay and had their opinions ignored, he said. – (Bloomberg)