LIVE: Reform UK unveils plans to overhaul council-controlled pension funds and save billions for taxpayers. https://t.co/Fu3Fs9heQH

— Richard Tice MP 🇬🇧 (@TiceRichard) September 1, 2025

I did not get an invite to Richard Tice MP’s pension press announcement. I didn’t have to wait, it was streamed on Tice’s twitter and now it’s streamed on. Reporting it does not mean I’m supporting it, but if more people say they agree with Reform than any other party, I’m surprised there has been so little interest in the pension press. Perhaps they think that Reform will be over by the time the next election comes but that is to miss how influence can be excreted with the LGPS. As a result of its summer’s winners, Reform is big in several council’s.

Reform won 41% of seats up for election

Reform won 677 seats (41% of the total) and gained control of 10 councils.
This is the first time that Reform (or the Brexit Party, as it was previously
known) has controlled any councils in local government.

What Tice said?

Tice’s message at his press conference was simple, Reform aren’t going to wait, they are going to start pulling money out of existing pools for a new Reform Pool which will go for lower fees, less active managers and where it invests outside of indices, local investment to where the money has come from. If this happens it is going to make differences in counties and regions such as Lincolnshire, Kent and large swathes of the north west of England

Tice stressed  throughout that Reform was not touching people’s rights to built up to date, Tice was evasive about people’s rights to join the LGPS in future, We did not get a spectacularly confident answer here.

Underperformance was the main theme for targeting.  Targeting and costs – which were separately dealt with,

Costs included investment fees but also the governance and compliance costs that Tice pointed out were duplicated a lot of times over to make for LGPS.

In questions he was keen to lay into advisers responsible for this inefficiency.

Also highlighted was the money thrown away in a range of exaggeratedly named green funds were labelled as woke

He would have investment in illiquid funds limited to  10% not 40%of the funds.

Just dealing with the 13 councils that that Reform look after he claimed “£8-12bn could  be saved”.

What the Press asked?

We got a range of press but few for whom  pensions were a first job, perhaps the most interesting from a pension point of view of the Unions , highlighted by the Daily Express who asked  which, when announced in June (as per this blog) , were the Union following? Tice was happy to dissuade the press  from believing the Unions were on the side of City investment managers,

Sky News asked if we’d be getting final salary, Tice was careful to refer instead to defined benefit but had some stern words not for the final but the ongoing salaries of those at the top end of the LGPS executive pay scales.

Conclusion

The final quarter of the press meeting disintegrated into a discussion of current political scandals.

Pensions can’t hold a press audience for an hour but Tice spoke with a fluency and perspicacity that has not been evident from any other politician in relation to LGPS.

It is a shame that the views of the party that currently holds sway over the thinking of British people, should be ignored by the pension press, it is time that they woke up to a new political and pension environment