Whether they are paying out for company performance can be difficult to establish. The schemes that do not pay out are still in a minority. Typically, when things do go wrong, to maintain executives' reward they are inevitably restructured and end up paying out regardless.

These kinds of comparisons are having a knock-on effect by dragging everyone else up with them. The idea is that lots of UK executives go abroad because of high salaries, but in reality there are only a very small number of global players.