I know I’m not quite alone when it comes to this, but: We need to be more transparent about salaries. People are always uncomfortable when I mention earning details (maybe because I’m doing OK and it comes out as arrogant / threatening; it isn’t meant to).

To the point. As Peston asks: how can we have let the average FTSE CEO salary rise by 2% in a downturn where their companies have lost 30% of their value? How can average CEO salaries have risen 295% in a decade compared with 44% for employees. Surely all should share in the value they are creating (oops, they just destroyed 30% of it). And on the ratio of average CEO pay to employee pay has moved from 47 times (acceptable) to 128 times (of course that says the same thing as the rise, but in a more digestible form).

I’m hoping that having public records of house price sales readily available will help balance out some of the fluctuations in the housing market (negotiation is much easier if you have an idea of how much money each side is concerned with).

In the same way a public salary discussion should help employees avoid being stiffed by their employers. Yes, I know we’d use bonus and perks to distort any transparency, but they tend to not be the majority of packages, and when we have messed the system up we’€™ll be twenty years down the line and can think of something else.