This from Jonathan Stapleton in a balanced article , offset by an unbalanced headline.

It noted that, in January this year, it had set out almost 50 pro-growth measures – adding it had now delivered “the vast majority of these and more”.

It said it aimed to go further next year and set out its aims for 2026 – including plans to further unlock capital investment and liquidity, accelerate digital innovation, reduce regulatory burden and make it easier for firms to start up and grow.

Among the measures it plans for 2026, the FCA said it would reform rules for venture capital and alternative investment fund managers and consult on the pension charge cap so consumers are not disincentivised from investments due to higher performance fees.

There has been a lot of hysteria about the cost of hedge and other funds that depend on performance fees as if the price paid – if things deliver , should not be paid.

This has been the line for some time from Jo Cumbo and it was the line she took from an FT article on Rathi’s letter to Starmer

Again, the article is about growth and the restrictions on the annual management charge are not what the FT are reporting the FCA as saying in the main part.

FCA boss promises more pro-growth measures in letter to Starmer https://t.co/K9LIVmMwAz

— FT UK Politics (@ftukpolitics) December 10, 2025

We are moving from retail to institutional investment of our DC pension plans , because of the reforms proposed in the Pension Schemes Bill and the CDC legislation. Necessarily , the FCA are reacting to a new climate where nailing down charges to the floor does not become the due diligence on whole of life investment.

It is hard to see how we can focus on the 49 items to do with growing our pension funds over time if we so over-emphasise the caps on charges that so restrict it.

I think back to my late founder of AgeWage and ClearGlass, Chris Sier.

His determination of the impact of charges on pure growth was much higher than the charge cap. He praise pools like Border and Coast for transparency and for delivering value for the money, even when the costs were high.

Necessarily, when counting all the costs that an expert will consider in making a direct investment or into a fund, expensive obstacles have to be balanced against opportunity. It is the nature of long term investment that these costs are spread over time to make a business case for making it and necessarily the charges may be accounted much higher in the early years than any charge can allow.

By comparison, the funds that were set up within GPPs and the emerging master trusts from 2012 took millions of people into investment for the first time and have worked.

As Martin Lewis discussed with us last Tuesday, many people have no comprehension of investment and for them a simple guard rail that allows them to stay with pooled funds with charges well below 0.75% is obvious. You can listen to him on my recent blog that compares the sophistication of Nikhil Rathi’s letter to what Lewis is doing – with the same aim.

My blog asked whether we want both Lewis and Rathi and I have concluded we want both. That is not me being patronising to beginners or me lauding the experts but if we cannot move beyond vanilla pooled passive funds , then we have no ambition.

Steve Webb’s charge cap in 2014 was right and it has taken us a long way, but we must go further down the line. Here’s the FCA (not Johnny Cash).