Reform UK is prepared to pay City of London-level salaries to attract the investment talent it would need to run its proposed sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg reported, a sign the party is trying to get ahead of a familiar criticism of state-run investment vehicles: that they can't compete with the private sector for the people who actually know how to manage the money. The premise behind offering competitive pay is straightforward, a fund of the size Reform has in mind would need to hire portfolio managers and executives away from firms that already pay market rate, and a below-market public-sector salary structure has historically made that difficult for comparable state investment bodies.
The fund in question is the one Reform deputy leader Richard Tice unveiled in February as the centerpiece of his first policy package as the party's spokesman for business, trade, and energy: a plan to consolidate England and Wales's Local Government Pension Scheme, worth roughly £391 billion as of March 2024 and covering 6.7 million members, into a single British Sovereign Wealth Fund that Reform estimates could be worth up to £575 billion. That would dwarf the government's existing National Wealth Fund, which holds under £28 billion, and would place Reform's proposed vehicle among the eight largest sovereign wealth funds in the world.
Tice has framed the fund as part of a broader restructuring of how Britain manages its own capital, folding it into what he calls a new "Great Office of State" spanning business, trade, energy, and housing, which he says would deliver "a joined up, comprehensive department" built for "speed and action." The fund itself would hold listed shares in the UK and abroad under what Reform calls a strategic UK growth mandate, targeting technology, small and mid-sized growth companies, life sciences, and a limited set of strategic national assets, and the party has previously floated interest in taking stakes in firms like Rolls-Royce and partially renationalizing the water sector.
The willingness to pay for outside talent fits a pattern in Tice's broader pitch to the financial sector. He has been openly critical of what he calls London's "anti-wealth culture" and has pledged a wider recalibration of City regulation, at one point announcing four separate working groups aimed at rethinking how the City of London operates. Offering competitive, private-sector-style pay for the people who would actually run a British sovereign wealth fund reads as an extension of that same argument: that Britain's institutions have to compete for talent on market terms rather than public-sector pay scales if they want the fund to be taken seriously by the industry it would need to draw from.
Whether any of this becomes policy depends entirely on Reform actually winning power, and the plan still faces the practical hurdle of persuading LGPS administering authorities and millions of individual pension members to accept consolidation into a single, centrally run vehicle. But the salary commitment signals Reform sees staffing, not just structure, as one of the risks to getting a fund like this taken seriously, and that it intends to remove the most obvious excuse a skeptical City would have for staying away.