The new owners of the vocational training body City & Guilds appear to have more than tripled the pay of its top six executives right at the moment the company is cutting £22m of costs and shrinking its UK workforce.
The large increases to salary and bonuses have emerged during a scandal over the sale of the qualification awards business by its former owner, the UK charity City & Guilds London Institute (CGLI), to the international certification company PeopleCert.
Last week, Kirstie Donnelly and Abid Ismail, respectively the chief executive and finance director of City & Guilds (C&G), were put on leave as PeopleCert launched an investigation into how it came to acquire the training and awards business from CGLI.
The sale had already triggered a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission, after the Guardian revealed that Donnelly and Ismail were handed million-pound bonuses after the privatisation.
The Guardian now understands that, since C&G became a private business, the cumulative pay of the qualification body’s top six executives has risen by about 240% in the current financial year to about £6.2m, up from the £1.8m reported in its latest results to 31 August 2024.
The increase is believed to include one-off bonuses of more than £4m to those six executives – including the £1.7m award for Donnelly and £1.2m for Ismail – as well as a cumulative increase of about 13% on salary and payments from an annual bonus scheme, which now appear to total more than £2m for the group of six.
Overall, the Guardian understands that total one-off bonuses paid to C&G executives at the newly privatised company total about £4.5m.
Asked about the sharp increase in the remuneration bill, a PeopleCert spokeperson said: “The business doesn’t have any further comment at this stage.”
The jump in bosses’ pay has emerged after the Guardian reported that since its sale last October C&G has embarked on a £22m cost-cutting drive and is reducing the size of its UK workforce by hundreds of roles.
In a presentation published by PeopleCert last month, the company said £13m of the savings were “personnel cost synergies” that would largely be achieved by failing to replace staff leaving the institute with UK hires.
The document implied that C&G, which has more than 1,600 staff members and 1,800 “associates” on short-term contracts, has a “churn” rate equivalent to about 300 people leaving a year and outlined how PeopleCert plans to relocate a third of those jobs to Greece “at a cost [of] up to 50% lower”.
The same quantity of roles “are due to not be replaced due to overlapping functions”, the presentation added, while the remainder of leavers will be replaced with hires in the UK.
The presentation appears to have been removed from the PeopleCert website after the Guardian published its report last month.
The pay awards coinciding with an extensive cost-cutting programme has proved an embarrassment to the privatised company and its former charity owner.
C&G has previously said: “Trustees were not involved in any pre- or post-deal conversations regarding remuneration matters for CGL executives that would apply after the sale. This is a matter for the new City & Guilds Ltd owners.”
However, the Guardian understands that discussions were taking place among the charity’s trustees in 2024 and they voted on the bonuses in May 2025, when bonuses of four times salary were considered. While CGLI said that trustees subsequently voted not to pay bonuses relating to the sale, the figures discussed appear similar to those eventually awarded to executives by the private company.
PeopleCert did not explain the apparent coincidence when asked about it by the Guardian.
CGLI said it is cooperating with the Charity Commission inquiry and that it is “confident that all actions taken by the trustees have been proper, transparent, and in line with our charitable purpose”.
