Member

Following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, said, before we come to new Section 28C and the specific part of this Bill that deals with it—as well as my own amendments seeking specifically to include it, if that is where we end up—I would be grateful if we recognised that there is a problem here. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding on the part of the Government about how the real estate investment trust industry has reinvented itself in order to offer long-term investors, such as pension funds, diversified access to expertly managed infrastructure investments, alternative energy, real estate and so on—as well as private equity—in a closed-end structure. The industry has done that to give pension funds the option of investing in either type of asset so that the market will not continue to be skewed away from one of Britain’s investment success stories, which we are so proud of and which has served investors extremely well over many years.