Bobby Dean

I thank the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley (Callum Anderson) for securing this debate and for bringing his great experience to it. I hope to build on his comments encouraging the Government to build on the momentum of the pension reforms they have recently introduced. The UK investment system holds £6 trillion-worth of investable capital, mostly via pensions and life insurance schemes, so there can be no doubt at all that the financial services sector will be key to growth when it returns to this country properly, but access to that capital has become a problem. We hear it all the time from businesses. That can only be a systemic failure. Central to the problem is the UK’s allocation of its pension funds, which, as has been noted, collapsed from levels of around 50% back in the ’90s to an average of just 4% now. Some of that is explainable. Some of it was inevitable, as capital markets went global and people diversified their portfolios—we were always going to see a decline from those heights of around 50%—but the UK sits below the global average of allocation, which is 13%, so the UK has a specific problem that it needs to address. We have to ask how we got here. I think the root is a certain naivety in the way that we applied laissez-faire economics. As a liberal, I support free and open trade with the world, but with a narrow interpretation of what free and open means. We have marginalised the state’s role. We have moved its role of shaping the conditions for UK businesses to thrive to the periphery. We have been so hands-off that we have allowed our economy to be dominated by a handful of actors who have accrued pretty unchecked power in a fairly anti-competitive manner. An example I would point to is the proportion of our pension funds that passively invest into big global indexes. An example is the MSCI world index. It allocates more of British pension savings to Apple than to the entire UK economy—around 5% to Apple and 3.8% to the UK. What does that mean in practice? It means that when brilliant UK tech start-ups want to scale and are seeking out capital, their only option is to be sold out to one of the big US competitors that pension savers in the UK are funding. So the cycle continues, whereby Britain fails to scale its businesses to the level required. Britain needs to be more streetwise and a bit more hands-on. We need to redesign our system so that it can still take advantage of global capital markets, while being clever about the way it incentivises and actively supports the growth of the UK economy. One way in which I believe we can do this has been suggested by the New Capital Consensus project, of which I am a member: to right-size some of our defined benefit pension funds so that they are big enough to actively manage funds and to identify and invest in the opportunities that exist across Britain. They should not be so big that they find those kinds of regional opportunities more hassle than they are worth, and they should not be so small that they choose to manage their funds passively in the way that I have just described. At the moment, we have around 5,500 small defined benefit pension funds, and while each charges low fees for a fair return, I ask: at what cost is that a fair return? Is it really good value to get over 8% for the individual saver if the country around them is in decline? Should the real test of value not be about the return to not only the individual but society? After all, this is the country in which they seek to live and retire. I encourage the Government to build on the progress they have made so far with the pension reforms and to look more broadly at investment funds across the sector. I believe that if we can right-size some of those pension funds to incentivise them to identify and invest in UK businesses, things will be delivered for not only those savers but the country as a whole.