John Godfrey is off again! The last time he left L&G it was to be the head of policy for Theresa May. This time he’s off to help in the West Midlands which should be levelling up to the wealth we see in London.
I have had many happy meetings with John around the back of the corporate bike shed , having a crafty fag. He has been seen in the Cockpit pub (which could do with a bit of levelling up itself) and we’ve had some serious conversations about how L&G are putting their and our money to work for a better Britain.
I first came upon John when his boss, Nigel Wilson , was delivering his famous Beveridge 2.0 vision , which caught my imagination and has had over 50,000 reads on this blog alone.
By then , John was already a fixture at L&G. He is an almost exact contemporary, his youth was spent in Lochaber Scotland , he graduated in law from Oriel College Oxford and has worked his career in the City. He knows about corporate affairs, he is also masterful in political circles, this photo of him captures his political personality perfectly!
Levelling Britain up
John nowtells us ….
I intend now to focus on working from the inside to help our brilliant cities achieve their full potential working with institutional funds as well as public money.
I hope that this will mean we can stay in contact. “Levelling up” finds its way into pensions through the Local Government Pension Scheme , whose funds pledge to invest 5% of assets for the benefit of local communities in the UK
Nigel Wilson’s vision of seeing money in workplace pensions being put to work for the betterment of the more deprived areas of the UK can now be furthered in a wider way with master trusts and the defaults of workplace GPPs deploying our money in a similar way.
Nigel Wilson too is leaving L&G, he and John had offices next door to each other and they are the best of friends. I hope that Nigel will be able to support John’s efforts in the years to come – Geordie that he is.
The work that they have encouraged over the past ten years is now coming to fruition, L&G are only one of many signatories to the Mansion House Compact and it is hard to open a pension publication without seeing ideas that Godfrey and Wilson pioneered , now being thought of as mainstream.
But “getting it done” is another thing. Walking through Wolverhampton or West Bromwich is not quite the same as walking down Walbrook or Watling Street. The City’s wealth needs to find its way to the north and west of the United Kingdom. John could be a key man in that – I wish him luck.
