LGC Investment Series Podcast · Local Government Chronicle

LGC Investment & Pensions Summit 2024 - Is the Government about to merge parts of the LGPS and enforce UK investment?

·32 min·2 clips

Joe Kempton says he would not design the LGPS pension-fund merger model from a blank page.

Recorded at the Birmingham summit, the episode opens with Martin George setting the scene for a discussion about government change and LGPS reform. The panel brings together three perspectives: Joe Kempton, Singhal Selassie, and Mike O'Donnell. The real question is not the headline itself. It is what the headline means once it reaches fund governance, investment strategy, and implementation. The conversation treats consolidation as a practical issue rather than a slogan. It asks how far a new government can push change before local realities start to weigh in. The word local becomes a live point of disagreement. Joe says the meaning has been hard to pin down, and that it has already shifted in earlier discussions. He points out that what was once described as local was, at one stage, effectively UK. That distinction matters because some funds do not run local allocations at all. Lincolnshire, he says, prefers diversified portfolios rather than setting aside a fixed slice for its own region. He argues that this can create conflicts of interest if an investment goes wrong. In that case, the impact is felt twice: through the pension fund and through the local taxpayer. The panel also acknowledges that some funds do have explicit local mandates. Even then, the governance burden can be substantial. Finding suitable investments, monitoring them, managing them, and handling local politics all take time and attention. The episode keeps coming back to implementation. Border to Coast's UK opportunities work is mentioned as one example of how asset pools are responding. The overall tone is cautious, analytical, and steady. It leaves the listener with the sense that policy ambition is only the starting point.

As heard by us

LGPS reform meets the practical limits of governance, diversification, and local investment.

Recorded at the LGC Investment and Pension Summit 2024 in Birmingham, this episode frames the new government's LGPS reforms as a practical test of what funds can actually absorb.

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Why you'd press play

You want the LGPS tradeoffs behind the government's push to change the system.

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