The 'concern trolls' who object to pay transparency for those at the top should be ignored

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“Concern trolling” is such a useful classification for a particular type of irritating obstructionism that it’s a wonder we survived without it for so long.

For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, which comes to us from internet debates, it describes when a person professes to agree with a group’s goal, but then cavils over the proposed methods.

Concern trolls claim these methods will be counterproductive, or merely create other problems, and that the best course of action would actually be to do nothing, or return to the drawing board.

What distinguishes concern trolling from constructive disagreement over tactics is that the objections are obviously trifling or contradictory. A miasma of spuriousness hangs over them.

Concern trolls may be disingenuous, merely trying to frustrate the goal they claim to support. Yet they can also be honest, with the troll sincerely believing their incoherent objections are serious enough to warrant stalling everything.

Whatever the true motivations, there’s been a notable outbreak of concern trolling in relation to transparency over pay in recent months.

When the BBC released its rough breakdown of the pay of its “stars” last month the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, said that while, of course, he agreed with the broad objective of transparency for a public sector broadcaster, the publication of these figures would result in a “poachers’ charter” for other broadcasters.

He, and others, even asserted that BBC presenters’ pay would end up rising after the figures were made public – something few wanted.

When Theresa May became Prime Minister she said firms would be required to publish a pay ratio between chief executives and the median worker in those firms.

But according to some, such information would be dangerously misleading because some firms’ workforces have radically different structures and the raw figures would produce wildly different boss-to-worker pay ratios.

A group called the Big Innovation Centre, which claims to support reform of executive pay, is also a strong critic of pay-ratio publications, suggesting they could prompt companies to game the system in a way that does no one any good, for instance by encouraging the outsourcing of low-paid work.

Some even argue that the very fact chief executives’ pay is published in company reports at all is responsible for the massive inflation in bosses’ pay at the top in recent decades.

The logic underpinning all these positions appears to be that if you want to keep pay at the top under control it’s best to keep it hidden.

The logic is weak, confirming that what we really have here is concern trolling.

It’s true that company boards’ remuneration committees tend to look around at other executives’ pay for a benchmark when setting that of their own chief executive, and many want their boss to be above the average for fear of looking as if they have a second-stringer in charge (even though it’s mathematically impossible for all bosses to be paid better than the average). Boards want their bosses to be reassuringly expensive, like Stella Artois.

But this silly game represents a weakness of corporate governance, of boards stuffed with lazy yes-people, not an inherent problem with transparency.

A new report from the High Pay Centre shows FTSE 100 chief executives’ remuneration actually fell by 17 per cent in 2016.

This seems likely to be a vindication of transparency, specifically the requirement from the Coalition in 2013 that public companies publish a “single figure” for top bosses’ rewards which cut through all the various ruses firms had previously exploited to disguise them.

The public debate has been enhanced and given focus since that reform was introduced.

The 2016 fall in average pay may prove to be a one-off, but the tentative signs are that public pressure and campaigning over excessive pay in public companies is actually working.

As we’ve seen with the glaring disparity between the pay of women and men in senior BBC jobs, a lack of transparency is not really a blanket of socially useful discretion, as Tony Hall’s arguments suggested, but a cover for sexism and favouritism.

Reasonable people can disagree about how much privacy ordinary individuals should have when it comes to their compensation. But remuneration for those who hold very senior positions in business (where pay packages often owe less to market forces and personal productivity than simple power) is a different matter.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” wrote the US judge Louis Brandeis in 1914. “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases”.

And for publicity and sunlight we require a firm bias towards transparency.