Directors’ Pay

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

My hon. Friend is right, and that was one point that institutional investors made when we consulted them. They saw that the option of having a three-year unchanged policy would be helpful in deflating top pay. She is right that the problem that we are dealing with is an upward spiral in which pay is often unrelated to performance and top executives are trying to get into the top quartile, where by definition they cannot all be.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Is the Secretary of State not singing a different song from the one that he used to utter from the seat where I am now? He used to talk about the balance between people on both sides in business—the trade unions and the bosses. Is the truth not that he has come here with a set of proposals that might have been okay some time ago, but that he has been tied hand and foot by the Tories in the coalition and even got rattled by being asked a few decent questions by the pleasant shadow Business Secretary? What a transformation.

[Vince Cable]

I know that the shadow Secretary of State is indeed very pleasant. I will concede that point. I did not think his questions were terribly good, but he is certainly very pleasant.

As for my performance when I used to sit in the seat where the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) is now, I did indeed warmly welcome Patricia Hewitt’s changes seven years before the end of the Labour Government. They were a big step forward, and they were helpful even though taken as a whole they were quite a weak package. What is happening today builds substantially on those proposals.