London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to merge the country’s 39,000 public sector pension plans into one scheme, which would invest in building and updating the UK’s roads, airports, railroads and other infrastructure.
Yesterday, one of the UK’s largest pension funds, the London Pensions Fund Authority (LPFA), backed the idea.
But Sean O’Grady, economics editor of the Independent, offered a counter-point recently in his column. The bottom line, he says: “Sensible pension fund managers do not send their money where politicians tell them to.” From the column:
What most sensible pension fund managers do not do is send their cash to where politicians tell them to. If they do invest in the public sector, via PFI schemes, they do so via specialist companies and private equity vehicles who have worked out how to make money out of running prisons or trains. They do not do so directly.
There are good reasons for this. Let us take a few examples from history, “investment opportunities” presented as safe, prudent and lucrative ventures that successive governments poured taxpayers money into. The Millennium Dome; The Humber Bridge; Concorde; the NHS IT project; all vastly over budget, and an utter waste of money.
Or the Advanced Passenger Train and its unique “tilt” mechanism; cost £150m and never carried a single fare. Any and every block of 1960s high-rise flats that has since had to be dynamited, though the local authorities who built them are still paying off the debt. Nuclear power stations that promised electricity that would be too cheap to bother metering. Not to mention Boris’ glass testicle, by which I mean City Hall, as it has been renamed with cruel cockney humour.
Now of course there are worthy public projects that can earn a return for investors. The point is that the best people to decide on whether to invest your hard earned cash into such schemes are not the politicians who would like to get some votes off the back of them, but the investment managers we appoint to look after our cash. Private or public sector, would you really lend Boris Johnson your life savings so he can run a tube line to Bromley? I thought not.
The Mayor originally proposed his plan in a weekend op-ed in the Telegraph, which can be read here.