Austerity Britain certainly is a rum old place at the moment. In a few weeks’ time our beloved political class will return to Westminster from their extended jollies. No doubt they will be raring to make the country fairer and more prosperous for all its citizens, able and disabled, employed and unemployed, young and old. Let’s just hope they make a better fist of the job than they did over the last year.

A case in point is the disgraceful inequality when it comes to pay. Last year pay for chief executives at Britain’s biggest listed companies skyrocketed more than six times faster than wages in the general workforce, pegging the average boss’s pay packet at £3.9m. A worker on the national average salary of £23,474 would have to work 167 years to earn the annual pay of a FTSE 100 boss.

Of course, this is just the average. Some executives are doing much better, thank you. Jeff Fairburn of Persimmon, for example, pocketed a cool £47.1m while Simon Peckham at Melrose earned £42.8m. In fact if you take into account bonuses, top bosses’ average annual take home is a measly £5.7m. That represents 23 per cent pay rises for them in 2017 compared to average worker earnings, which have failed to keep pace with inflation, at 1.7 per cent.

The argument is that these payments are justified by performance and, in particular, stock market values. However, value is a word open to many interpretations. What about activities that may not be hugely profitable but are of genuine social value?

I, as a taxpayer, would be happy to subsidise the expansion of green, renewable energy enterprises that never make a profit, simply because they profit the whole world. Similarly, firms that rewarded employees more generously might well cut shareholders’ dividends. That would mean more money spent in the local economy and a fairer work culture.

In fact, using the value of the stock market to assess someone’s performance is bogus on many levels. Share values are routinely manipulated by speculators and subject to currency fluctuations. Not to mention the biggest single giveaway in history financed by us, the taxpayer, to bail out a dysfunctional financial system, known as quantitative easing.

We might also ask ourselves how much money any human being deserves as a reward for their labour. Most of us are comfortable with the concept of a minimum wage (although the current one is set disgracefully low), so why not have a maximum wage?

Personally, I believe that a maximum annual income of £500k with surplus earnings diverted to pay for things of real social value, like schools, affordable housing, hospitals and decent social care would go a long way to making Britain a more pleasant place. Nor would it inconvenience anyone with reasonable aspirations in life. In fact, we would be doing wealthy folk a big favour. Think how much more they would value their luxury yacht or car if they had to save up to buy them.

Of course, pay inequality is the tip of a very dangerous iceberg when it comes to unfairness in our divided country. Regional differences, social class, race, gender, even demographics of age all play a part. Nevertheless, it is one area of life in which a determined government could very quickly take decisive steps to start addressing the problem.

Here are a few modest suggestions. Firstly, workers in medium and large enterprises could have an automatic right to representatives on the board of the company. This would help to de-normalise obscene rewards at the top and extreme differentials between employees. There should also be more legally-enforced reporting of gender pay gaps as women often find themselves among the worst paid in all sectors of work.

Another much-discussed plan is to introduce maximum pay ratios for public sector companies and firms benefitting from public sector contracts. A good ratio to begin with would be 20:1, a measure that would make employers consider the cost of endemic low pay in Britain today.

Pay inequality is both a moral and economic problem we have allowed to reach a crisis point. Legislation and clear political will are needed to mend the gap.