HOW TO GET BY ON JUST £13,000 PER WEEK.
Sorry, but I for one cannot see where that ‘85%’ comes from. The last 90 minute rail journey I experienced from Kings Cross to Newark in April this year was not only prohibitively expensive (about 40p per mile), but I had to stand all the way back pressed up against a toilet door. I’m a lot less than 85% satisfied with that, thank you. And if you have a target, shouldn’t it be 100%? Even then, why should simply turning up for work, being paid a massive wad of cash for doing so, need to be supplemented by the equivalent of an annual win on the National Lottery?
Do nurses get 17% of their salary as a bonus if 85% of their patients survive? Do firemen get the same deal if they put out 85% of fires?
So; let’s look at what the Golden Goose, - that’s us, folks, has laid out for these lucky sods:
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| The face of a worried man contemplating the cost of his weekly shop at Waitrose |
The biggest winner is Sir David Higgins, the chief executive who will receive a £99,082 bonus on top of his current £577,000 salary.
Patrick Butcher, the group finance director, will get £67,658 bonus in addition to his £394,000 annual pay. Robin Gisby and Simon Kirkby, respectively the managing directors for network operations and infrastructure projects, will have the struggle of having to live on their £371,000annual salary alleviated with another £63,708.
Paul Plummer, the group strategy director, gets another £59,759 on top of his measly £348,000annual wages, which is nice, because he’s responsible for the country’s track infrastructure.
The five men are also in line for a long-term bonus, covering the company’s performance from 2012-15. Network Rail had tried to damp down the controversy by cutting the maximum annual bonus from 100pc of salary to 60pc. The failure to meet the regulator’s punctuality target has resulted in the five men ‘only’ being paid bonuses amounting to 17pc of their salary.
If you’re working class (oh, what an old-fashioned concept), then the way we measure our working wages is by the week. The more a rich person ‘earns’, the less likely they are to talk about it - it’s either embarrassing or very ‘private’. The rest of us, whose subsistence wages the well-heeled rail against and always seek to cut, have no qualms about revealing what we get by on. I have a pension of £150 per week and supplement that with the odd bit of writing. If I make a total of £12k in a year I’m lucky. Most of that’s gobbled up with the usual expenses, running a car, council tax, groceries, two cats, but if we’re careful we can even manage a holiday.How on earth do they manage?
But think about these people like the Network Rail board, and all the other members of the growing tribe of the absolutely loaded. Sir David Higgins’ weekly wage works out at about £13,000, whilst the lowly Paul Plummer only makes a sad weekly £8,400.How on earth do they manage? Of course, they’ll have company cars and company credit cards and expenses, but even so, such hardship must be a worry for them every day when they wake up and think - how will we get through the month? Still, they can number themselves among the many other victims of austerity, and find comfort in the Prime Minister’s laudable claim, “We’re all in it together”.