How many summers do you have left?

If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but largely the work of the then Lord Mayor of London, Nick Lyons, and designed to push the UK’s largest private-sector pension providers to commit funds to unlisted equities and vital infrastructure – all to the good. If it succeeds in ‘unleashing the full investment might’ of the £360 billion Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), as the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she intends, even better. We’d have a public investment fund to rival those of the Netherlands and Singapore, though still way behind the likes of Norway and South Korea.

But the LGPS is currently held in no fewer than 87 separate funds, each with their own trustees and managers and collectively clocking up £2 billion of annual fees and costs: imagine all the town hall fiefdoms and masonic stitch-ups that will have to be taken apart to convert that lot into Reeves’s ‘engine for UK growth’.