Mansion House Accord
Debate between Torsten Bell and Matt Rodda(1 day, 22 hours ago)
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Torsten Bell
The hon. Lady is right to say that we see higher engagement levels among young people today in investing more broadly. Whenever I go into a school sixth form, a surprising volume of the questions are not, unfortunately for me, on what the Government are doing and how we will bring inequality down and get growth up, but are instead, “How do we make a lot of money quite quickly?” We should support that level of engagement and active investment.
On the hon. Lady’s specific point, schemes are required to set out their policy and approach, and many pension schemes provide members with options for how they wish their funds to be invested. Nothing that has been set out today on the accord gets in the way of those approaches that are already in place.
Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)
I warmly welcome the Mansion House accord and the Minister’s statement. During the last Parliament, I had the pleasure of taking part in a cross-party visit with the then hon. Member for Hexham to see a solar farm that was funded by pension investment. It is a wonderful scheme close to the M4 and my constituency. Could the Minister say a little more about how this announcement will support much broader investment in the green transition, both in the south of England and across the country?
Torsten Bell
I have benefited from conversations with my hon. Friend about this topic, given his previous experience. He is completely right to set out that one of the large reasons—although not the only one—why we need to move to being a higher investment country is that our energy infrastructure has to be upgraded, and fast, if we are going to give this country the energy security it needs. He mentioned solar. This Government signed off in a matter of days and weeks a string of solar farms that needed to be invested in and that had been sitting on Ministers’ desks for year after year. More broadly, when the Leader of the Opposition stands up and says, “We don’t want to see this progress on net zero,” what she is really doing is putting up a sign across Britain saying, “Closed for business.”