The High Pay Centre (HPC), a British thinktank founded in 2011 by former Guardian business editor Deborah Hargreaves to scrutinise executive pay and the widening gap between CEOs and ordinary workers, is to close. Polly Toynbee argues that its demise removes a distinctive voice that focused not on tax and redistribution but on "predistribution" — the underlying causes of pay inequality and how corporate governance sustains it. The closure means an end to its widely reported annual findings, such as "fat cat day", which repeatedly drew attention to the scale of top pay even in right-leaning media.

The HPC's work highlighted that UK incomes are the second most unequal among rich nations after the US, that the median FTSE 100 CEO is paid around £4.4m a year, and that no FTSE 100 firm has appointed a worker director, unlike 13 EU countries plus Norway where employee board representation is legally required. Its funding came from the Financial Fairness Trust, established with a £90m windfall from the 2016 demutualisation of Standard Life and chaired by the late Alistair Darling. Last summer, owner Aberdeen Group abruptly terminated the trust, sacking its CEO and trustees; it has since reopened as the Aberdeen Group Charitable Trust, now supporting nature and employment rather than inequality research. Toynbee links this to a broader retreat from diversity and fairness initiatives following Donald Trump's campaign against "woke" DEI policies, with UK firms and politicians such as Kemi Badenoch — who pledged to abolish the public sector equality duty — following the American lead.