Nigel Wilson is a mentor of many people looking for pensions to grow and show some entrepreneurial spirit, I like those who he works with too.

There is not space here for the whole lunchtime conversation in the Times between Sir Nigel Wilson, City grandee and chairman of Cambridge Innovation Capital, who is championing infrastructure investment for technology and life sciences.

Having explained what the opportunity for investment in our own country is, Wilson concludes

The problem is not “a capital availability problem”, but a “capital allocation problem”..

“In very big-picture terms, we [the UK] have £6 trillion of long-term capital, twice our GDP, so we’ve got lots and lots of money … How are we allocating that capital? Massive amounts in gilts and cash … and that’s just a waste. We want that to help grow the economy … and at a macro level, we want to move from being a savings economy into being an investing economy.”

Two years ago, his Capital Markets of Tomorrow report, commissioned by a taskforce of grandees chaired by the London Stock Exchange boss Dame Julia Hoggett, called for an overhaul in order to attract £1 trillion of investment in the next decade to fund housebuilding, infrastructure and start-ups.

The pace of reform has, similarly to the government’s Mansion House reforms — to encourage pension funds to increase investment in private assets — been “really poor” and “at the margin”, he says.

The frustration of a published report being like a “firework” — brief media attention, before getting filed and put on a shelf — has also motivated Wilson to work at a “micro level” with institutions.

“Look, we’ve got a willing government, much more willing regulators, a huge amount of capital, huge amounts of projects, some great IP [intellectual property]. Have we got the recipe of self-determining success? Have we got enough existing pre-conditions? Yes is the answer to that.”

Well Nigel Wilson, I agree and there are those who are of a similar age to you who have the energy you have and the maturity to understand what you are saying. I am delighted that a group of us are working without pay to build a pension structure that can do what you ask of pensions.

Wilson finishes in a style that I admire and want to emulate.

A key pension reform would be “soft compulsion”, where people were opted-in via defined contribution schemes to invest in UK assets.

“Then the probability of them [private growth companies] becoming listed becomes much greater because they’re much more owned by UK institutions. At the moment they’re not … All the UK institutions drop out after series A, basically, and everything else is very foreign-denominated … and this is a mechanism for changing that.”

With the UK having missed out on the last great technological wave of companies to the US and its “Magnificent Seven” stocks, the race to win in the new generation of AI, quantum computing, nuclear fusion and preventative healthcare is especially important for economic growth, he believes.

“We should be not overly spending too much time on admiring the problem, which is what we’re really good at in the UK, but actually delivering on the solutions to it.”