Elite welfare and the good fortune of just being there

This paper examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and seeks to explain this phenomenon with the concept of elite welfare. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we analyse the impact of participation in the CJRS on executive remuneration between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on a sample of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 firms (n = 246), we find that receipt of furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive officer (CEO) performance pay and total remuneration in the immediate post-pandemic year. We interpret these results through a new analytical approach that understands elite income derived from rent-extraction facilitated by public policy or expenditure as a form of welfare. Unlike conventional welfare, which typically comprises relatively modest payments and concessions to broad sections of the population, elite welfare accrues to a small minority in privileged positions, taking the form of extractions of rent arising through opportunities created by government policy. We argue that recognising elite welfare as a parallel welfare system – largely insulated from competitive constraint and market discipline – provides a valuable new perspective on the interdependencies between inequality, public policy and the redistributive logics of the modern state.