Paul Rhodes: This is a problem we are seeing. How do you get into it? How do you price it?


It gets more difficult with funds worth less than £100m. The regulator says they must prove value for money, so their options are often more limited.


This is why there is a big move to master trusts. They have the scale to do this, but not everyone wants to be in a master trust. So, how can we work together to create impactful opportunities which are more assessable to defined contribution savers?


Is the EBRD acting as a broker when it comes to build back better? Stuart Trow: Yes, but not to an ideal extent. As development banks go, we are one of the smaller ones.


It would be nice to leverage those strategies and get more peo- ple on board, but we can still take on multiple projects. A problem is that because of the nature of infrastructure it is not a perfect market. Things get lumpy and you do not neces- sarily get an efficient mix of assets. It can end up one sided with too much wind power, for example.


Development banks could play a role, but it needs more guid- ance. What are we aiming towards? What does a green economy look like in terms of how it is financed and who will be the major players? Frith: We have seen an effect of doing it piecemeal: you suddenly run out of power. Everyone suspects that if there are as many electric vehicles as they are planning to have by the end of the decade there is nowhere near enough electricity to power them. Are you going to account for that by importing electricity from overseas coal-fired power stations? Halfon: One of the biggest challenges is that if you immedi- ately close the coal-fired plants, you cannot power the entire grid.


There are discussions to be had on how we are going to imple- ment the energy transition. Should it be piecemeal, should we replace everything or build on what is already there? BP and Shell, for example, are repurposing some of their North Sea platforms by building wind farms on them.


This is more complicated to do at the country level. Where do you put the wind farms, for example?


Dec-Jan 2022 portfolio institutional roundtable: Build Back Better 9


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