The Co-op Bank isn’t worthy of its name

We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is to achieve the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ that the Prime Minister seems to have sketched on the back of a pizza box. We’ve also heard that the Chancellor is looking at ways to squeeze billions for Treasury coffers out of the private pension sector. What we haven’t heard so far is a plan to join those two pieces of the economic jigsaw — by encouraging pension managers to become committed investors in infrastructure projects. There are signs of a small shift in that direction among local authority pension funds, but at a recent World Pensions Council event, one speaker described overall long-term investment of this kind by UK institutions as ‘minuscule’.

Meanwhile, league tables of top global infrastructure investors include many Canadian and Australian pension funds as well as sovereign wealth from the Middle East and China — on which we can’t continue to rely. But our own pensions industry traditionally shuns complex project financing, preferring the liquidity of government bonds — though may prefer them a little less if Rishi Sunak cuts the returns on index-linked gilts by switching them to a lower measure of inflation. If instead he can find ways to incentivise a useful portion of our £6 trillion of private pension wealth towards backing hydrogen power, e-vehicle plug-in networks, small nuclear reactors for every city and an ocean of wind turbines, Downing Street’s green daydream might have a better chance of meeting reality.

Never-ending troubles

The Co-operative Bank has been in trouble for so long that some observers are surprised it still exists as an independent business. It has had six chief executives in nine years and never looked stable since a £1.5