I recently published a letter by 250 CEOs of companies asking that investment into UK companies come from pension funds, I didn’t realise this had been organised by the London Stock Exchange but now I can state that it does and I am writing this a three iron away from the Stock Exchange’s Paternoster entrance doors.

I have been friends with Darren Philp for many years but I cannot support him on this. Enough is enough, we can’t deprive the companies that are not just the backbone of our pension system but of our economy by pumping money as we do around the world leaving our UK entrepreneurs and established companies bereft of the capital we have and they need.

We cannot pretend that the fiduciary principle is working. It is not. The trustees of our commercial DC providers are not acting in the general good, the fiduciary responsibility is between a trustee and a beneficiary. It could be argued that the nation is a beneficiary of pension investment as our growth as a nation depends on pension investing in our economy.

With the best will in the world, the new trustee of a commercial organisation is a professional or commercial trustee and their beneficiary is the organisation of their work, the provider. The provider needs to keep the cost down and returns up, they want trustees who will help them win VFM arguments by winning short term analysis of performance against cost. The result is inevitably passive investment in globally diversified funds.

The concept of fiduciary responsibility has been subjugated to the commercial considerations of the provider and the wider obligations of the trustee all but forgotten.

Now the Government is saying that unless providers and their trustees take a long-term view of their social (and their environment and moral(g)) responsibility, bad things will follow. We don’t know what bad things they are but the Stock Exchange, like some ladies in the House of Lords, want action.  If there is not  investment in UK stocks via the various markets offered by the Stock Exchange and via the investment companies that the Stock Exchange quote, they want financial advantages given to these commercial providers (and the non-commercial occupational trusts) to be wholly or partially stripped from them!

Here is Darren on Linked in, behind this there is a thought piece in Professional Pension.

Darren has had general support from those I respect including the CIO of People’s Pension Dan Mikulskis.  I know Darren means well but he sounds “woke” in the wrong sense of the word. At the risk of sounding Trumpian, pipe down Darren.