As the UK government pushes for pension scheme consolidation, dreaming of economies of scale and a dearth of domestic private investment, we look at the Netherlands and Australia for clues as to what that might look like

Outgoing New York City comptroller Brad Lander has told the city’s pension systems to fire BlackRock over its climate track record. This has not gone down well with the world’s largest asset manager

Steve Hodder, a partner at LCP, said the proportion of the gilt market owned by defined benefit schemes was “quite frightening” - particularly given the number of DB schemes closing and the large amount of buy-out activity

People’s Pension, which runs £38bn in assets, is aiming to align its investments with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warning below 1.5C but some US asset managers are pivoting away from ESG investments

Natural capital investments are finding favour among major asset owners, according to data from Gresham House and AOX’s own sister publication MandateWire. We hear from two asset owners on what’s driving their interest in the sector.

The first chief executive of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan told AOX forcing funds to invest in their domestic economy usually results in ‘suboptimal’ returns

With new regulation enabling multi-employer collective defined contribution pension schemes expected to be finalised this month, CDC is attracting growing interest from pension providers and employers

The leader of Derbyshire County Council, which is now controlled by the right-wing populist Reform UK, tells AOX why they are shaking up how the pension scheme he now controls is invested

Dan Mikulskis, chief investment officer at The People’s Partnership - which provides one of the UK’s largest master trusts, has recently completed a transition of its asset ownership model which involved building a team of specialists

In the 1990s the UK pension funds and UK insurers accounted for just over half of all UK quoted shares but according to ONS data that has now dwindled to just 4.2 per cent. What happened?

Last year Royal Mail became the first UK company to launch its own collective scheme. Is CDC here to stay?

So far the Scottish government has not issued a pooling mandate, but whether the UK government’s pension reform agenda fails to make it north of the border remains to be seen

British pensions minister Torsten Bell is worried about conflicts of interest in the professional trustee and investment consultants markets

Rachel Elwell, chief executive of Border to Coast, raises the prospect that the long-awaited pension dashboard might encourage savers to question how much exposure they have to private assets

Torsten Bell told the Pensions UK conference he does not believe he will need to use the powers given to him by the pension schemes bill to force funds to invest in UK assets

Richard Law-Deeks thinks that by 2030 there may be as few as four local government pension scheme pools in England and Wales

Pensions UK’s head of parliamentary affairs Katy Little said she had never seen a bill move as quickly though parliament as the pension schemes bill.

Moves in the US are afoot to make it easier for pensions to invest in crypto - with Harvard’s endowment a prominent asset owner to do so. But is a similar trend in play on this side of the Atlantic?

Mercer studied 52 countries and found 77 per cent of them impose some sort of investment restriction

The 21 LGPS abandoned by the closure of the Access and Brunel pools have all found a home, but the Isle of Wight Pension Fund isn’t happy with its lot

Last year a host of asset owners terminated mandates with hedge fund managers but the tide may have turned.

Retail investors have been pulling money out of ESG investments for several years as enthusiasm for the style turns negative. Is this reflected among asset owners?

The merger between Lothian and Falkirk schemes has been put on ice…again

What are the challenges facing the chancellor and are British pension schemes really are laggards compared to Canadian ones, when it comes to investing in private assets?

In the first edition of AOX we look at the early data on whether pension schemes are actually investing more in private assets or not, in response to Rachel Reeves’s requests.