The Guardian view on corporate governance reform: be stronger, not weaker | Editorial
Attacks on excessive executive pay and calls for more consensual company management have always marked Theresa May's Conservatism out from that of her more Thatcherite colleagues. Mrs May has highlighted these issues often since she became prime minister. At the weekend she returned to the theme in a newspaper article, echoing Edward Heath's 1973 phrase about the "unacceptable face of capitalism". Now she is having another try, launching a package of measures on high pay, workers' rights and corporate governance to mark her return to the political stage after the summer break.
Mrs May's concern about these issues is right and rational. They are unfinished business for modern Britain. Unfortunately there is little that measures up in this package. Several of the ideas that Mrs May floated in 2016 - themselves fairly modest in the first place - have now been trimmed back or dropped altogether, in response to lobbying by the chancellor, Philip Hammond. Binding annual votes by shareholders on executive pay have bitten the dust. Now the City's self-regulatory code will require companies only to publish the pay ratio between CEOs and their workforce average. Plans to put employee representatives on company boards have been abandoned. Now the appointment of a non-executive director "to represent employees" will suffice.
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