Master trust Nest has launched a campaign to promote its regional investments around the UK, after research showed less than a quarter of savers know where their pension is allocated.
The £50bn pension fund has teamed up with Brendan Sheerin, a tour guide and host of long-running Channel 4 series ‘Coach Trip’, to take a busload of Nest members around Yorkshire to show them examples of their savings at work.
Nest invests approximately £13bn in the UK across listed and private assets, including windfarms, ports and shopping centres, and it intends to grow this to £20bn by 2030.
A survey by Mortar Research conducted earlier this month found that 83% of 2,005 UK savers felt it was important to know where their pension was invested, but just 24% said they actually knew.
In addition, the research showed that just 23% of respondents expected their pension to be invested locally, which Nest said indicated that savers were “unaware… of the positive impact their money could be having in their own communities”.
The ‘Everyday Investors’ campaign comes as Nest is seeking to engage more with its members to understand their expectations and ensure they know more about their retirement savings.
It recently launched a “member assembly” project aimed at bringing together a “diverse group of Nest savers, selected to reflect the scheme’s membership, to discuss and make recommendations on key issues affecting their pensions”.
Catherine Howarth, chief executive of investor advocacy group ShareAction and a board member at Nest, said last year that defined contribution members needed better representation within master trust governance structures.
Speaking at an event in November hosted by the World Pensions Conference and the Pensions Management Institute, Howarth said: “Members deserve a stronger voice in the governance of their capital. I don’t think this is sentimentality or idealism. I think it’s a foundation for legitimacy and long-term trust.”
She added that, through the member assembly project, the Nest board expected to “learn a great deal about what works, what doesn’t, and how deliberative structures apply in the context of a large pension scheme”. Feedback will also contribute to the master trust’s next review of its statement of investment principles.
