We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is to achieve the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ that the Prime Minister seems to have sketched on the back of a pizza box. We’ve also heard that the Chancellor is looking at ways to squeeze billions for Treasury coffers out of the private pension sector. What we haven’t heard so far is a plan to join those two pieces of the economic jigsaw — by encouraging pension managers to become committed investors in infrastructure projects. There are signs of a small shift in that direction among local authority pension funds, but at a recent World Pensions Council event, one speaker described overall long-term investment of this kind by UK institutions as ‘minuscule’.
Meanwhile, league tables of top global infrastructure investors include many Canadian and Australian pension funds as well as sovereign wealth from the Middle East and China — on which we can’t continue to rely.
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