Lord Fuller (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 99 in particular but I generally associate myself with all the amendments in this group, including Amendments 95 and 98 in the names of my noble friends. As we have heard, there is no conclusive evidence that bigger is best when it comes to investment management. Of course there are some large funds that do rather well, but, as I explained on a previous day in Committee, within the Local Government Pension Scheme it is the smallest fund in the Orkneys that has outranked the performance of all the 88 other schemes in the LGPS, and there is something to be said for that. It has never changed its investment manager, and there is a lesson there. In my experience, the best returns are to be made in investing in companies where you either buy the product or know the management—not so that you can tap them for inside information, of course, but because it hardly ever pays to invest in bad people. I also like to buy when prices fall because, let us face it, buying high and selling cheap is never a good investment strategy. But there is no evidence at all that scale in and of itself is good. There is plenty of evidence that it is worse. As they say, the larger they are the harder they fall, and small ones are more juicy.