Boss of British Gas owner gets 44% pay rise to £2.42m

British Gas owner Centrica has revealed boss Iain Conn received a 44% pay rise to £2.42m last year, days after a bill hike for millions of customers came into effect.

Mr Conn's package was up from £1.68m the year before when he missed out on bonuses amid disappointing financial results.

British Gas increased standard tariffs by 10% to an average £1,254 at the start of this month, affecting four million customers - in line with regulator Ofgem's energy price cap.

Remuneration figures published in Centrica's annual report showed Mr Conn was paid 72 times as much as a typical employee in the lower quartile of the company's salary range - a smart energy expert paid £33,718.

However, the chief executive's pay still falls well short of the £4m he received for 2016.

Scott Wheway, chair of the remuneration committee, said it had been "another challenging year" amid volatile markets and political intervention in the sector.

But he added that the committee "has been impressed by the resilience of the leadership team which has pulled together strongly to deliver against a wide range of targets".

Annual results published in February showed British Gas shed 742,000 customer accounts over the course of the year in which it twice hiked tariffs - and announced thousands of job cuts .

Profits for Centrica's UK home energy supply division, which includes British Gas, were down by 19% to £466m, though the overall group's headline measure of operating profit rose 12% to £1.39bn.

The company warned in February that it faces a £300m hit for the current financial year from the impact of the price cap as well as a declining performance for its energy exploration and production division and nuclear arm.

Ofgem introduced a cap on default energy prices following years of political pressure, which came into force on 1 January and promised to save customers a typical £76 a year.

It had an immediate impact on British Gas, the UK's biggest energy supplier, as the cap was set at a level £68 lower than its standard variable tariff (SVT).

However, the regulator said just weeks later that the cap would rise on 1 April by an average £117, blamed on higher wholesale gas and electricity costs.

All of the UK's so-called "big six" energy suppliers, including British Gas, have since followed suit, lifting their own SVTs to the newly increased cap level.

Centrica has described the price cap as unsustainable and "likely to have unintended consequences for customers and competition".