The news of the investment accord between 17 of our largest DC investors is good news. The wonderful Corporate Adviser has latest figures on how these providers are competing against each other and the composite assets when considering occupational and contract schemes. They believe that 9 organisations have made the £25bn barrier and to find out

(I won’t be publishing it- you should register with CA and download from this link)

What we should be asking, and what CA is bold enough to ask, is why three providers are not joining the accord. John Monks of Fidelity gives his reasons on this week’s VFM Podcast.

It will be interesting to find out the reasons for Hargreaves Lansdown and Scottish Widows. Hargreaves Lansdown have always encouraged free thinking and choice in investments – even in its workplace pension Vantage but Scottish Widows…?

Scottish Widows are owned by Lloyds and this appears a bit close to the epicentre of the financial system. Lloyds and Government had had some co-reliance around the banking crisis.

Am I pleased? I am pleased to hear what the FT has discovered

Report by Mary McDougall and George Parker

Rachel Reeves will on Tuesday set out contentious “backstop” plans to force large pension funds to invest up to £50bn in private assets if they fail to meet voluntary targets in a new “Mansion House accord”.

Treasury officials said the UK chancellor would legislate later this year to create a reserve power for ministers if the accord fails to deliver results.

The announcement comes as 17 of the UK’s largest pension funds pledged on Tuesday to invest at least 10 per cent of their assets in private markets by the end of the decade, half of which will be invested in the UK.

So how does this work for organisations that do not join or are not invited to join the accord?

Well I’m pleased to see that as a country we are looking forward to investing in the UK and in private market and well done Natwest Cushon  for asking its members. Corporate Adviser tells us…

The report comes as research from NatWest Cushon shows 52 per cent of savers agree that pension funds should invest more in the UK and only 8 per cent disagree.

That’s a lot of “don’t knows” and many “don’t cares”. I don’t think that most people are paying as much attention to this as experts would like them to but that we’re being asked to consider the politics of pensions is good news.

I’ve written this morning about Reform and pensions. Reform is what you get when you ignore the attitude of large parts of the population. Global pensions have still got a place but a home bias is what I suggest the population understands.

You cannot do it on your own (Virgin Money had the worst performing workplace pension of the 21st century until they stopped investing in the FTSE 100), but you can do it together.

We showed we could make a different to pensions and the economy in the last three decades of last century and it has only been since a move from “best endeavours” to a “mark to market” strategy in the early years of the 21st century that we lost a belief in pensions as “the economic miracle”. Let’s hope that Rachel Reeve and Torsten Bell will relight that fire!

Let’s make sure that we support the DC pension accord by asking questions of those who don’t.