The JEP reported on Executive payments:
"BONUS payments made to the chief executives of government-owned entities have gone beyond a fair and appropriate level in some cases, the Chief Minister has said. Deputy Lyndon Farnham told the States Assembly yesterday that while he was in favour of the payment of bonuses when they were justified, he did not believe this was always the case."
"Matt Thomas of Ports of Jersey and Mark Siviter of Jersey Post, each of whom was paid a 2024 bonus of £120,000, while Chris Ambler of Jersey Electricity collected a £115,400 bonus and a deferred bonus of £44,200. Darragh McDermott of JT Group was awarded a bonus of £106,000 and a long-term incentive plan of £74,000."
"The other chief executives referenced in the report published last Friday were Ian Gallichan of Andium Homes, whose 2024 bonus was £27,300, Helier Smith of Jersey Water (£43,000) and Jersey Development Company’s Lee Henry (£65,000)."
Bonus and The Ratchet Effect
Once spot bonuses are paid, this sets new expectations. Year 2 targets get reset around last year’s elevated pay and bonuses, even if organisational performance hasn’t improved.
Because pay budgets rarely shrink, what started as a one-off bonus becomes a de facto permanent uplift to the salary baseline. Reducing it later is politically and administratively painful, so total pay only ratchets up over time.
Most of the organisations mentioned here are or should be theoretically bound by public-sector pay frameworks (often with top-end ceilings), but bonuses fall outside those ceilings. The ratchet effect thus becomes a back-door mechanism to inflate total remuneration.
Without a hard cap on overall reward or strict ratios, chief exectutives can see compensation climb well ahead of frontline staff, exacerbating employee pay gaps.
Policy Remedies
Transparency is critical. The High Pay Centre argues for mandatory pay-ratio disclosures and legally enforceable ceilings on the multiple between chief executive packages and an organisation’s median wage.
"BONUS payments made to the chief executives of government-owned entities have gone beyond a fair and appropriate level in some cases, the Chief Minister has said. Deputy Lyndon Farnham told the States Assembly yesterday that while he was in favour of the payment of bonuses when they were justified, he did not believe this was always the case."
"Matt Thomas of Ports of Jersey and Mark Siviter of Jersey Post, each of whom was paid a 2024 bonus of £120,000, while Chris Ambler of Jersey Electricity collected a £115,400 bonus and a deferred bonus of £44,200. Darragh McDermott of JT Group was awarded a bonus of £106,000 and a long-term incentive plan of £74,000."
"The other chief executives referenced in the report published last Friday were Ian Gallichan of Andium Homes, whose 2024 bonus was £27,300, Helier Smith of Jersey Water (£43,000) and Jersey Development Company’s Lee Henry (£65,000)."
Bonus and The Ratchet Effect
Once spot bonuses are paid, this sets new expectations. Year 2 targets get reset around last year’s elevated pay and bonuses, even if organisational performance hasn’t improved.
Because pay budgets rarely shrink, what started as a one-off bonus becomes a de facto permanent uplift to the salary baseline. Reducing it later is politically and administratively painful, so total pay only ratchets up over time.
Most of the organisations mentioned here are or should be theoretically bound by public-sector pay frameworks (often with top-end ceilings), but bonuses fall outside those ceilings. The ratchet effect thus becomes a back-door mechanism to inflate total remuneration.
Without a hard cap on overall reward or strict ratios, chief exectutives can see compensation climb well ahead of frontline staff, exacerbating employee pay gaps.
Policy Remedies
Transparency is critical. The High Pay Centre argues for mandatory pay-ratio disclosures and legally enforceable ceilings on the multiple between chief executive packages and an organisation’s median wage.
While they don’t always specify a single fixed number, they’ve frequently highlighted ratios like 20:1 or 10:1 as more socially sustainable alternatives to the current norms—where FTSE 100 CEOs often earn over 50 times the median employee pay
Linking bonus awards to truly one-off projects (e.g., exceptional crisis response) rather than recurring Key Performance Indicators can help prevent them embedding into base pay.
Overhauling pay frameworks so that total annual remuneration—including bonuses, pension contributions and allowances—falls within a single, self-enforcing cap avoids the current loophole.
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