Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)

I am not sure that “directly held” applies to an LTAF either. The fact is that you have wrappers and underlying assets. It is discriminatory, and that should be tested. I still do not see how, when you have the public policy laid out by the high-level working group set up to create LTAFs, you can then say, “A private negotiation overrides that”. I stand by that. I know that the Pensions Minister received a letter from a past lord mayor, Alastair King, who is one of the architects of the Mansion House initiatives, on 22 October last year. He relayed that he had encountered both support for the investment trust market and concerns that the Bill did not acknowledge the potential of the investment company structure. That evidence—one of the architects asking, “What’s going on here?”—also seems to have been ignored. I come to the same basic point: for me, the Government have not provided a clear, public or specific rationale for this exclusion. I would say that neither has the ABI, but I did not know that it runs the country. All of the evidence points the opposite way to what the Government have done. Officials have confirmed in meetings that no assessment of using listed investment companies has been carried out, despite the clear steer of the policy in the working group to do so. It seems that this Q&A from the ABI overrides a Bank of England/FCA/government working group. That cannot be so. The only explanation ever offered is that there are “suitably targeted guardrails”—a phrase that has never been defined, evidenced or justified. What do you have to guard from in a listed investment company? Competition? Transparency? That is a very strange thing to say; it is an instrument of division and discrimination, protecting secrets. Let us remind ourselves of what we are dealing with: two collective investment vehicles, each of which is a wrapper holding protected assets of net asset value for the pension scheme. That is where they differ from an ordinary equity. An ordinary equity does not have any protection for the assets; if the company goes bust, it is bust. If the listed investment company goes back to the net asset value, the assets are still there for the pension fund. That is the difference, which is why a collective investment vehicle such as a listed investment company belongs with the LTAF; it does not belong with an equity. I still do not see why they stick so closely to some Q&A but, whether by design or by accident, they have produced a proposal that I still say is without foundation, without evidence and, frankly, without integrity. It is irrational and procedurally unfair, and it fails to take account of relevant and public considerations, relying instead on things that have not been consulted on and that have been presented through private industry discussions. I have never seen anything like this before. There are simple ways to make it fair in various proposed amendments in the rest of this group, spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann—