Chris Knight, CEO of Legal & General Retail Retirement comments on the Government’s Budget plans to encourage pension funds to invest in long-term assets:
“For some time now Legal & General has been encouraging the Government to recognise the importance of pension investment in long-term assets to the UK economy. In our recent response to the Pension Freedoms Inquiry, we called on the Government to consider the role of the ‘slow money’ from long-term savings in generating UK economic growth for future generations, particularly when considering any pension reform.
“Whether it’s investing the funds of those accumulating their defined contribution pensions or the capital made available through the purchase of annuities, ‘slow money’ is a central part of the social contract of pensions and has the potential to yield significant benefits in infrastructure, urban regeneration and boosting housing supply. Never has there been so much money available to for us to invest in our future, but so disproportionately and badly allocated. We need to be encouraging and supporting the investment of these funds to the benefit of future generations, to build the hospitals, schools, homes and jobs that our young people need across all the UK.
“These proposals for Government support of long-term investment by pension funds are therefore a really positive move in the right direction, and we look forward to working closely with the Government and industry to make the case for investing our pensions savings in a socially and economically useful way.”
The government’s move to have The Pensions Regulator (TPR) ‘clarify’ guidance on long-term investing struck J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s EMEA Head of Pensions Solutions & Advisory Sorca Kelly-Scholte as a bit odd in the Budget.
In her view, the disincentive to invest in long-term assets is less about regulatory constraints and increasingly about the structural maturing of pension funds. She thinks it’s likely that TPR will observe, as it has in the past, that there is ample flexibility in the existing regime for pension funds to take a long-term view and there are no explicit or implicit barriers to long-term investing in the current regime. The real mystery is why pension funds are failing to make full use of those flexibilities??
|
