10 things you may have missed amid U.K.'s overhaul of retirement plans

The U.K. government wants to leverage the country's £2.5 trillion ($3.18 trillion) retirement market to better support domestic companies, channeling up to £75 billion in defined contribution and defined benefit cash into alternative assets.

But more changes for the U.K. financial services sector were revealed this week in a series of documents — some in Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt's first Mansion House speech, delivered Monday, and others were published without fanfare.

Pensions & Investments rounds up 10 things you need to know.

• Expanding the Pension Protection Fund's purview: One of the proposals from the government under its Options for Defined Benefit Schemes consultation is to task the London-based, £39 billion PPF's board with running a consolidator pension fund for any plans that could benefit from being under its auspices. The proposal for the PPF, the lifeboat fund for the DB plans of insolvent U.K. companies, was first floated in a December review by the Department for Work and Pensions.
  
• Reconsidering DB surpluses: The government wants input on the building and use of pension fund surpluses. It wants to know what conditions should be in place before such surpluses could be extracted, the risks associated and, when a sponsoring employer runs both a DB and DC plan, whether it's appropriate for surpluses to be used as additional contributions in DC.
  
• Changes to the way local government pension schemes use investment consultants: A new consultation proposes changes to LGPS regulations to bring the use of investment consultants into line with other DB funds, including setting strategic objectives and reviewing said objectives at least every three years.
  
• Looking to Australia for DC: In response to an earlier consultation, the government suggested introducing a simpler system of "stapling," as seen in Australia, for the U.K. DC market. In that system, a participant's active retirement pot is assigned as theirs for life, unless they actively choose an alternative provider.
  
• A new DC growth fund: Monday's announcement that nine DC plans had pledged to commit at least 5% to private equities by 2030 under the Mansion House Compact could channel about £50 billion of new capital into private equities by the end of the decade. Those allocations will be made via existing or new investment vehicles, such as the Future Growth Fund first proposed in March.
  
• Extending collective DC rules: The government will in the fall consult on extending a CDC provision to whole-life multiemployer plans, pushing its rules to include master trusts. It will also move ahead with a provision for CDC decumulation-only products.
  
• Changing the short-selling regime: The current public disclosure regime — based on individual net-short positions — will be replaced with an aggregated net-short position disclosure regime. That means total net-short positions of 0.5% of company shares will be published to the market by the Financial Conduct Authority in future, rather than individual positions at that threshold. The threshold for reporting a net-short position to the FCA will also increase to 0.2% from 0.1%.
  
• Investment research is back in the spotlight: An independent Investment Research Review, tasked with considering levels of financial services investment research in the U.K. and its contribution to the competitiveness of capital markets, suggested allowing asset managers to pay for investment research in other markets where bundling — paying for execution and research together rather than unbundling these charges — is standard practice.
  
• Simplifying prospectuses: To help attract the fastest-growing companies to list in the U.K., the government outlined changes including the simplification of prospectuses — replacing the European Union's "outdated regime."
  
• A new stock market for private firms: The U.K. will establish a stock market that lets private companies access capital markets without having to float on an exchange. The so-called intermittent trading venue — a world first — will be introduced by the end of next year.