Council pension funds urged to invest in waste
Author: Mark Smulian, Materials Recycling Week |
Local government pension funds should plough money into waste and other infrastructure investments to boost their returns and support essential projects, an influential think-tank has said.
Localis’ Credit Where Credit’s Due report argues that pension funds could invest on their own and also help capitalise a 30bn National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) to promote local economic growth.
Pension funds’ investment could also encourage private capital into infrastructure projects, notably in waste, where the reluctance of banks to lend had hampered schemes.
?With 14bn lost in the crash, local government pensions schemes are turning their attention to the more stable, if less spectacular, wins offered by domestic infrastructure,? it said.
Launching the report, communities and local government secretary Eric Pickles said: ?Pushing power and resources away from Whitehall is creating the conditions that will lead to a sustained and balanced economic recovery across the country.?
The report said the NIB could be financed from a combination of money created by the Bank of England’s quantitative easing, and public and private pension funds.
It argued that pension funds of all kinds had seen poor returns from the equity markets in recent years and could do better by diverting a modest part of their investment into infrastructure projects.
Localis chief executive Alex Thomson said: ?We need to get Britain’s economy growing again. We believe that a bottom-up approach is the best way of catalysing such growth, and we are confident that the recommendations in our report would enable both more, and better-targeted, investment in the local infrastructure we need.?