UNION leaders have condemned bosses at Ordnance Survey for accepting big bonuses.

As revealed in the Daily Echo , six directors at the publicly-owned map-makers shared up to £130,000 in payments on top of their salaries in the last year.

Despite austerity measures meaning other public servants have faced wage freezes or even cuts, the figure for “performance related pay” given to chiefs at the Southampton -based agency jumped by up to £45,000 on the amount handed out 12 months earlier.

Average wages for workers at the organisation remained stagnant during the same time, at £30,493.

Don Campbell, branch secretary at Ordnance Survey for the union Prospect, which represents more than half of the 1,100 staff at the £40m headquarters at Adanac Park, Nursling , said the directors should not have accepted the payments.

He said: “The bonuses may fit into the senior civil service performance pay systems but they could have said no.

“This would have been an opportunity for the directors to align themselves with their staff in terms of how we are all facing up to austerity and pay freezes.”

Southampton Itchen MP John Denham has also questioned whether the bonuses were justified “at a time when everybody else is tightening their belts”.

The Ordnance Survey’s annual accounts reveal that between £100,000 and £130,000 was dished out in bonuses to six directors during the last financial year.

A year earlier, its executives were given between £85,000 and £110,000.

Sales and market development director James Brayshaw, who has a basic salary of up to £130,000, received the biggest additional payment, pocketing between £25,000 and £30,000.

Two more directors received at least £20,000, while chief executive Vanessa Lawrence got between £15,000 and £20,000.

Paul Hemsley, Ordnance Survey’s director of finance and corporate services, was the agency’s highest paid individual, earning a total of £237,500 last year, which included a bonus of up to £10,000.