HM Treasury has yesterday launched a consultation on proposed measures that would force banks to disclose the rewards given to the eight most senior non-board executives. The measures will affect the 15 largest banks operating in the UK, including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and UBS.

The draft proposals come after Sir David Walker published a review of banking governance in 2009 in which he proposed that banks disclosed the number of its staff earning more than £1m annually. The coalition government spurned this idea saying international consent would have to be agreed before this could happen, but European regulators had mooted the idea in the summer that this salary band should be reduced to £500,000.