That's (very) rich!
Building societies, Issue 1622 NOT much sign of pay restraint at Britain's third largest building society, where a new chief executive is trousering plenty of the mutual's members' savings.

Susan Allen arrived in March last year at Yorkshire Building Society's Bradford HQ from Barclays, where she had been "head of customer transformation" giving a "differentiated customer experience". This experience plus a prior role at Santander, agreed Yorkshire's long-standing chairman John Heaps, was worth a salary of £758,000 – about 30 percent higher than her predecessor. But that wasn't all the 170-year-old institution had to offer.

Leaving present
On top of the regular pay came, ahem, £1.7m "to compensate for deferred awards on leaving her previous employer". In other words, Yorkshire Building Society members had to pay for work done at Barclays under a scheme designed to encourage people to hang around!

Then there was £832,000 "to compensate for lost incentive opportunity in respect of the 2022 performance period" before she joined. Now the members were paying for work not done for anybody.

Pillar of society
When it came to the work she did actually do for Yorkshire in 2023, she won't be complaining to the low pay commission either. To add to the £655,000 salary for 10 months, so spectacular was her early success in the job that she earned an annual bonus of... £777,000.

All told, with pension and some benefits, less than a year into the role Allen had trousered more than £4m.

Rank-and-file staff are limited to less than 10 percent in bonuses and have recently been wrangling over a below-inflation pay offer. Perhaps they should put in for some work they haven't done.