In reviewing the looming industrial conflict over public sector pensions, the Telegraph has picked up that there are 99 different local government pension funds managing well over £100 billion in assets: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8872087/Government-and-the-unions-should-unite-against-the-pension-fat-cats.html
'An analysis by AGP, a Dutch pension organisation, has demonstrated that huge sums are extracted by the financial intermediaries who manage those funds – and that there is a wild variation in the size of fees they charge.
In some smaller funds, eight times more of the annual income goes towards such charges than in the larger ones. If these pension funds were consolidated from 99 to, say, 14, and the costs were reduced to the lowest currently charged, the savings would be gigantic.
In fact, they would be equivalent to each worker contributing close to an extra 3 per cent to their pension, the exact amount by which the Government wants public sector workers to increase their contributions'.
