Eight City banks in £1.8m pay spree Goldman Sachs was among banks under fire at an Occupy the London Stock Exchange demonstration in London last October. Photograph: Dan Dennison/Rex Features The government faces renewed pressure to announce tough measures on bankers' pay this week as data shows that the average remuneration for 1,265 senior staff was £1.8m in 2010. The analysis of regulatory disclosures by eight leading banks comes as the business secretary, Vince Cable, prepares to announce on Tuesday how he will tackle the issue of executive pay. Research by the Guardian has found that the average pay deal was £1m or more for employees regarded as having the most influence over risk-taking activities at their firms. The highest average was at Goldman Sachs (£4m) and the lowest at HSBC (£1m), during a year when data from the Office for National Statistics showed the average wage in the UK was £25,900. Banks are being forced to publish the information for the first time under European rules that are helping to lift the lid on secretive City bonuses at a time when top pay is a politically charged issue. Executive pay has been rising faster than salaries for the average worker across the UK and Cable is expected to announce a range of measures to give shareholders more powers to vote down pay deals. However, he is expected to step back from putting employees on remuneration committees. In 2010, the pay of the bosses of the UK's top 100 companies jumped by an average of £1.3m to almost £4.5m, according to the High Pay Commission, which has been influential in setting the policy changes that Cable intends to announce. The government's policies on pay are being announced as bonuses for 2011 are handed out across the City and the bonus arrangements for the bailed-out Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland are being discussed. The remuneration committee at RBS is expected to meet this week amid pressure from David Cameron to ensure the bonus for the chief executive, Stephen Hester, is lower than last year's £2m. A figure of £1.5m has been mooted. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he expected the RBS bonus pool to be "considerably lower" than it was last year. "We have been very, very clear that in RBS - and for that matter in other banks - the bonus pool has got to be considerably lower than it was last year," he told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show. Asked about Hester's rumoured payout, he added: "You are asking me about a hypothetical outcome that I don't believe will arise." Ed Miliband went further on Sunday night, calling for Hester to be stripped of his bonus altogether. "If responsibility means anything I don't think he should be getting his bonus," he told BBC Radio 5 Live's Pienaar's Politics. Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer who resigned as a Treasury spokesman over the lax treatment of banks by the coalition, said: "This lifts the lid for the first time on the heaving cauldron of gambling and greed in London's investment banks - 1,265 investment bankers collected £1.8m, on average in a single year, almost 75 times the average wage." The regulatory filings of eight leading banking groups - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Nomura, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC - were analysed for the information provided about "code staff." These are the individuals deemed to be responsible for managing and taking risks. The data is for the year to 31 December 2010, except for Nomura, which is for the year to 31 March 2011. For non-UK banks, the filings are for the UK or European operations. The highest average deal was at Goldman Sachs Group Holdings (UK) which had 95 code staff in 2010 who were received an average of £4m through schemes whose ultimate value will be known in five years and depend on the share price. In addition, bonuses in shares - yet to vest - worth about £390m were handed out at Goldman Sachs in 2010. JP Morgan has 82 code staff who were paid an average of £2.6m in 2010, Citigroup 95 who fall within the definition and were paid an average of £2m, while at Nomura, which expanded in the City after buying some of the operations of the collapsed Lehman Brothers, the average was £2.1m for 65 code staff. At Merrill Lynch UK Holdings, owned by Bank of America, the 94 code staff earned an average £2.3m. Eight individuals received £22m in signing-on fees during 2010. Data from the UK banks was first published last year. At Barclays there were 231 code staff with an average of £2.4m while HSBC had 280 on an average £1m. At RBS there were 323 code staff with an average of £1.1m. These banks have more code staff as they are based in the UK, where their operations are larger than those of the international players. The numbers for UK banks also include overseas staff. Jon Terry, a partner at consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, said this was the first time such levels of pay had been disclosed by banks and would contain some discrepancies. "Within code staff there will be a head of compliance and a head of equities, who is going to earning relatively more," said Terry.