Brunel and Access have been told to merge with others and  not waste time and money thinking about alternatives.

This is pretty brutal stuff and the answer to separate pools is brilliantly put forward by what has been delivered over the past ten years

I cannot comment on the choice of assets, none of the performance plotted would have done well as sticking the money in global equities (£) and all would have outperformed gilts and bonds. But do you need 7 pools to act separately for councils?

Reading the statement from Government tells me that the tone of Bell and McMahon is quite different from what has come from DWP and Local Government.

Two of the eight vehicles that manage pension assets for town halls in England and Wales have been told they must merge with one of their rivals, marking the biggest overhaul of Local Government Pension Scheme “pools” for a decade.

ACCESS and Brunel, which manage close to £90bn between them, said they had received letters from pensions minister Torsten Bell and minister for local government Jim McMahon, saying their business plan “does not meet the government’s vision for the future of LGPS”

Frankly, who outside the cossetted world of asset managers, consultants and decision makers within councils  will give a toss?

To the list of beneficiaries of the multiple pools and the ninety or so councils that play the game of choice, let’s add the conference organisers, publications and worst of all, the dinners sold back to fund managers and consultants  to allow them to show off to clients.

There is a very different atmosphere around today, I felt it first in Edinburgh when Torsten Bell told us to “get real” and I’ve cottoned on to what getting real means. Today parliamentarians are being hauled into Westminster to vote on the future of Scunthorpe’s steelworks – that’s real.

Outside the nice questions about choosing managers and consultants is the brutal reality of Tariffs and what they are doing to the asset values of pension companies and the cost of borrowing for local authorities.

Can we please get on with the business of merging the weaker and less efficient pools whose vision does not fit in with the Government’s vision for the future of LGPS?

I know a little about the concerns that are about Access and Brunel but I have no worry about quick decision making by Government. The whingeing from Access is over time

“Ministers barely gave the pools 30 minutes to discuss and explore their proposals and it now looks like the ‘consultation’ was, as feared, simply a step on the road to a pre-determined outcome,”

The LGPS consolidation process started in 2015 when former chancellor George Osborne announced plans to pool LGPS assets, initially aiming for up to six “British wealth funds”.

Last November, the government announced it would create a series of “megafunds” across the £392bn LGPS by forcing town halls to move all of their assets into the pools but fell short of instructing them to merge.

Instead, the pools — which manage pension assets on behalf of 6.7mn people who work or worked mainly in the public sector — were asked to submit business plans to ministers by March 1 on how they would meet government’s requirements.

The reality is that the strongest of hints have not been taken and we are now in the age of “getting real”.