While the ABI hurried out a paper I wrote about over the weekend saying insurers had invested next to nothing (0.24% of £268bn)  in retail workplace pensions (around £650m), institutional investment is  a different matter for organisations seeing investment as collective and institutional in “pensions”.

At Manchester , away from the alcohol and crazy games in the exhibition, there was sensible conversation about what will be happening this week to accelerate the pretty well non-existent flow of capital into the UK economy by-passing the listed markets into companies that otherwise will be invested in from abroad. That is not to say that we need foreign money too – especially long-term pension background, it’s just we need to be doing the same ourselves.

The FT makes no bones about it, whether Nest, Australian Super or Legal & General, what we are seeing is a serious commitment to the country.

Three pension giants have made a fresh £3bn wave of commitments to invest in rental homes, infrastructure and fast-growing companies, ahead of a government-backed meeting in Birmingham to discuss how they can work together to boost their investments.

Legal & General said on Monday it would invest a further £2bn across housing and infrastructure over the next five years, in addition to a previous pledge made in 2022 to invest £2.5bn in build-to-rent homes.

AustralianSuper, Australia’s largest pension fund, announced an initial commitment to invest £500mn within 12 months in UK residential projects, with a focus on student, co-living and residential homes, and an ambition to become a “top five operator” of rental homes by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, the £53bn state-backed National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) has pledged to invest a further £500mn in its private equity mandate with Schroders in the next 12 months, with £100mn expected to be channelled into UK companies.

This is not about retail investment and LTAFs. A senior institutional investment manager wrote to me about the ABI’s promotion of LTAF’s for DC investment

Having been involved in private asset investing in a past life, I feel that most British Master Trust providers are missing the point and are approaching allocations to private assets in ways that are suboptimal. For example what are the LTAF structures all about ?

They are being offered as conduits to increasing exposures to private assets whilst ensuring daily pricing remains possible.

Who exactly needs daily pricing ? And for what purpose ? I feel the “problem” the LTAFs are solving is an illusory one. But the cost of using LTAFs is actually very real and lies in keeping reserves of cash inside the LTAFs that create a drag on returns delivered via the LTAF.

LTAFs are now a feature of the landscape and members are paying for them

Let us not pretend that the lack of investment in Britain from our pensions system can be resolved by retail products , especially LTAFs or by the thinking of the last 50 years from S226 to personal pensions and now retail master trusts.

There has to be liquidity for opt-outs , for tax free cash, for deaths and for consolidation but we cannot organise our pensions going forward on the basis that our major DC pensions won’t be intact in 25 years time. The housing, the companies and the infrastructure will still be being used and making money much past 2050.

The FT concludes with news that was circling the Pension UK Conference

The move comes ahead of pension summits in London and Birmingham this week that aim to strengthen relationships between institutional investors and policymakers as well as identify barriers to investment in the UK.

The word that was used across the sessions was “implementation”. We have had plenty of debating about mandates and compulsion all of which is frankly irrelevant to the discussions happening this week. Let’s stop messing around with LTAFs and the like and get on with investing the money of the mass of people (of which I count myself one) who want to be invested in our country and where there can be growth in time.

I am pleased that L&G and Nest have teamed up with AustralianSuper. I hope that it will spur the newly created  Sterling 20 Partnership  to stop competing on price and start considering VFM for savers and pensioners involved through their workplace.