New Capital Consensus: Driving Investment for Better Societies

This project identifies leverage points in the financial system to encourage long-term investment in societal objectives.

This project aims to identify the behavioural, political and regulatory levers necessary to release billions of pounds of private, long-term investment capital to green the UK economy and tackle structural inequalities. 

The New Capital Consensus (NCC) is a coalition of Chatham House, FinSTIC (IFoA), University of Leeds and Radix Big Tent. Individual members include

  • Professor Iain Clacher (Professor of Pensions and Finance, University of Leeds)
  • Ashok Gupta, Chair (FinSTIC - Institute and Faculty of Actuaries)
  • Ben Rich (Chief Executive, Radix Big Tent)
  • Peter Scolley (Managing committee, FinSTIC - Institute and Faculty of Actuaries)
  • Nick Silver (Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow, Bayes Business School)
  • Ana Yang (Executive Director, Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator)

Background:

Currently the UK investment system is not providing the long-term investment capital necessary to deliver net zero, from green power generation to sustainable transport to new energy efficient technologies. 

This is due to a mixture of perverse incentives, confused interpretations of ‘value’ and ‘risk’, and siloed knowledge and practices that instead promote short-term investment.

This project will apply a systems approach to understand the current financial system, its stocks, flows, and interrelationships, to identify the leverage points that will enable system-wide change.

This work will contribute to evidence-based policymaking that changes institutional behaviours to release more long-term capital investment to green the economy and tackle structural inequalities.

This project is run by Chatham House’s Sustainability Accelerator.

Advisory panel

  • Charlotte Clark CBE (Director of Regulation, Association of British Insurers)
  • James Palmer (Partner, Herbert Smith Freehills)
  • David Pitt-Watson (Visiting Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School)
  • Sir Keith Skeoch (Chair, QBE International, Ex Chair IA and FRC)
  • Paul Johnson (Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies)
  • Nigel Peaple (Director of Policy and Advocacy, PLSA)