The chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland has conceded that bankers get paid too much, mostly because of what he calls a “gangmaster” culture in investment banking.

The comments were made to the BBC’s Robert Peston and will be broadcast tonight at 9pm on BBC 2.

Sir Philip Hampton says:

The star quality, as it were, seems to filter down to people who don’t seem so star quality. There is, if I can use the expression, a sort of gangmaster cultural phenomenon in this, that you recruit top people who really do make a difference, who really do move markets and get business and are really high achievers.

But they do tend to associate themselves with people who aren’t such stars, but they want them around and they trust them, sometimes they move with them and there is a team associated with it. And the disparities between the top stars in the team and some of the journeymen players, if you like, is probably not as marked as it should be.

Sir Hampton also says that the ballooning of salaries has not been accompanied by better results:

The most peculiar thing about it all, actually, if you look at the last ten years of massive increases in pay is that the performance for shareholders has been pretty disastrous really across most banks. Some of them have gone out of business altogether and most banks have had a relatively poor performance for shareholders.

RBS is expected to award just under £1bn of bonuses in total this year, down from around £1.3bn last year.

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