(Jonathan Brady/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)It is undeniably good news that one of Britain’s biggest banks finally seems to have recovered from the last existential crisis but four to crash over these islands.
It seems a very long time ago that Gordon Brown was forced to step in to nationalise “Fred the Shred” Goodwin’s Royal Bank of Scotland only hours before it pulled down the entire British financial system.
It has taken 15 years to stabilise, clear out and rebuild NatWest, as the group is now known. There can be no doubting the hard work that current boss Alison Rose and her predecessor Ross McEwan put in to make that happen.
But equally, NatWest — like the energy companies — has also been to some extent the beneficiary of the events of the most recent and still ongoing global crisis.
The war in Ukraine triggered an inflation spike that has pushed the Bank of England’s lending rate up 390 basis points already — with more to come.
As our story reports today, NatWest’s net margin interest margin has widened considerably as interest rates have ballooned faster than savings returns.
With this in mind, was this really the moment to open the boardroom pay floodgates?
The chief executive’s package of £5.249 million is a 46% pay rise in 2021. It is 119 times the £44,000 paid to the median NatWest employee and 177 times the £30,000 received by those in the lower quartile.
Nobody is saying that running a bank the size and complexity of NatWest is a picnic.
But with a cost-of-living crisis still to run its course, perhaps this was a year too soon to let remuneration rip.
