Ministers are rowing back from a radical plan to encourage pension funds to invest in unlisted assets.
The move has been scrapped after it received a less than enthusiastic response from the investment industry and an emphatic thumbs-down from consumer groups.
A plan to relax the ceiling on charges paid by pension funds so that private equity houses could take 20% of any profits made from a pension fund’s unlisted investments came under particular fire.
In a consultation document published yesterday, the Department for Work and Pensions said its proposals were “not positively received or supported across the entirety of the pensions sector and other interested groups more widely”.
However, it said it was pressing ahead with plans to require larger pension funds – those with assets of more than £100m – to disclose details of how much they invested in unlisted assets and to force them to set out why not (if they were not invested in the asset class), under a new “comply or explain” regime.
