John Stepek

So I think people are waking up to what is actually quite a big hole in their household psychological balance sheet.

Yeah, thankfully so.

Basically, so we know the Mansion House Accord was like a voluntary agreement with 17 of the biggest pension providers in the UK to stick 10% of DC pensions into private assets and 5% of those had to be in the UK.

Now, okay, let's park whether that's a stupid, well, it is a stupid idea, but let's park that.

So the government in the pensions bill, rather than saying, okay, well, these guys have agreed to do this, that's fine.

They stuck in this clause, which basically says that if they don't do it, we can force them to do it.

And not only can we force them to do what they've said they'd do in the mansion house agreement, we can force that it's completely uncapped.

We can tell them to invest in anything at all.

The House of Lords thankfully kicked that back and said no chance that's not happening.

The government came back and said well okay we will just be able to mandate basically to the limits of what the Mansion House thing says so 10% in private assets and last night the House of Lords voted against that again and pinged it back to them.

And so now, basically, unless the government kind of backs down on this, chances are reasonable that actually the whole pensions bill will collapse, or rather it won't get through in this parliamentary session.

And the thing is, the pensions industry is not especially happy about that because they actually like a lot of the other changes, which you can't go through here.

But the point is, I don't know, I'm kind of grateful for the House of Lords here.

It's nice to see that someone's at least attempting to defend...

you know, our freedom to invest in what we feel we should be investing in rather than having it dictated to.

I said, well, I'm not.

I'm not.

I'm actually quite pro the House of Lords.

It's one of these things that works a lot better in practice than it does in theory.

Yes, we're not political at all.