USS

[Beninthesortingoffice]

And of course they are a major investor in Thames water.

I still can't quite get over the "the fund performed more poorly than if they had done nothing at all"

Harrumph

Refs for that second bit please ? Happy to join harumffing

It's in the USS annual reports. The report on fund performance compares the fund to a "reference portfolio" which is a basket of comparison investments that are selected but would not be actively managed. They do a whole load of sub group analyses and wording around risk and long term perspectives (which is reasonable) and have added in a new more poorly performing "low liability reference group" but the "reference portfolio" is the pre specified one and the "investment portfolio performance" section does clearly state "the fund was outperformed by the reference portfolio"

I am sure I read this first from Josephine Cumbo at the FT but I can't now find her analysis so maybe I am over interpreting.

Also really not a pension expert, so apologies if I am wrong here. But I don't think so.

I am also very pissed off about the 2.5% inflation cap. The DB pension under these rules will be pretty worthless after just a few years of current levels of inflation

And fund costs are high (to me) split into overheads (fair enough) and fund management (which would be fine except it is actually quite a lot of money - hundreds of millions - for being outperformed by doing nothing at all).

Not quite sure about the relevance of internal and external fund management

But credit to them. The annual reports are quite transparent.

Thanks. Assuming you're talking about the DB fund rather than the DC fund? The saving grace for the latter is that we aren't paying fees. But it does rather suggest that fund management is less than impressive.

What impact is the Thames Water shitshow going to have? Could this scupper the planned restoration of pre-2022 benefits? Sorry if that's a stupid question but I:m pretty clueless when it comes to investments (though even I could have seen the problems with Thames Water, a mile off).