What will be in an executive's pay this year?

A number of companies in the pub and brewing sectors will soon reveal how they fared over the past year. It'll have been a tough old 12 months.

After that the Next Big Thing to look forward to will be the 'annual report', a more expansive, colourful and often entertaining document, complete with a revelation of precisely what a company's management earned for its efforts in the previous 12 months.

Given the torrid year the industry has had, I can't believe many, if any, companies will be giving their top executives the sort of pay package increases they were granted in the good years.

As it happens, few, if indeed any, pubco executives have been awarded basic salary increases in recent years. But bonuses appear to be another matter. There is an argument that big bonuses are an essential component of any package in order to attract the best-quality people to the UK. This is often mentioned in relation to the financial sector.

There is also the argument that offering huge bonuses to the sort who created much of the financial mess in which we now find ourselves is somewhat… retarded.

But never mind bankers, in the pub trade incentivising executives with extras such as deferred shares differs little - in theory at least - from the bonuses that many operators give to their barstaff.

So what sort of activity actually merits a director being on the receiving end of a few extra thousand pounds on his pay packet? Successfully steering his company through choppy trading waters? Securing that all-important refinancing? Maintaining earnings per share levels? I think we should be told.

Chief executives and their right-hand men are hopefully big enough to handle the criticism that inevitably comes their way when their salary becomes public knowledge.

If they've earned it, fair enough. If they haven't, well, that's another story…