Let’s face it: water gets no respect next to diamonds.

Water has a far more critical role in our economy, yet most of us would gladly take the sparkling diamond over a bottle of water.

That is, until the water runs out.

“The diamond-water paradox,” or “The Paradox of Value”, first pondered by the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, in the 1700s (and featured much more recently on the US National Public Radio program Planet Money), is due to the widely held perception by investors that water is an abundant and endless resource with minimal value. But in a world of rising global water demand and climate-driven water stresses, that’s a risky bet. More than ever, water’s true value as a finite and precious resource is starting to be realised, and a growing number of investors are paying attention.

There are plenty of examples of water risk. Campbell Soup Company took a hit in its quarterly earnings recently, due to an acquisition of a California fresh food company that was pummeled by the California drought. Smithfield Foods and other meat producers sustained widespread losses in North Carolina – and more public criticism and legal exposure – from devastating flooding caused by Hurricane Florence. European Development Fund and other European utilities temporarily shut down their nuclear plants last summer due to heat waves and resulting increases in water temperature that can no longer be used for cooling.

The long-term signals are no better. At least one study shows the majority of the world’s groundwater resources are now potentially depleted beyond recovery. A 2017 MSCI analysis of food companies in the All Country World Index noted that $459 billion in revenue may be at risk from a lack of water available for irrigation or animal consumption. Another $198 billion is at risk from changing precipitation patterns affecting current crop production areas.

Population growth and deepening climate impacts – as evidenced by the recent US Climate Change Assessment – further compound these water risks.

Agricultural water use accounts for 70 percent of global human demand but water is a vital input for industries across the economy, including in apparel, beverages, electric power, mining, and technology. All face wide-ranging water risks – physical, regulatory and reputational – with material bottom-line impacts. In fact, more than 600 global companies surveyed in 2016 expected wide-ranging water risks to materialise in the next six years.

Dozens of investors with significant assets under management are working together to advance methods for analysing investor water risks, including portfolio water footprinting, scenario analysis, and stress testing as part of Ceres’ Investor Water Hub. More than 40 asset owners and managers, including State Street Global Advisors, contributed to the development of the open-source Ceres Investor Water Toolkit, a first-ever comprehensive resource to evaluate and address water risks across multiple investment portfolios.

Investors are also engaging directly with companies with medium to high water risk exposure, many of them in the food and agriculture sectors. In 2018, investors filed a shareholder resolution with Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, requesting that it adopt a water stewardship policy to reduce pollution from its suppliers. After the resolution was supported by 63 percent of independent shareholders, the company committed to improving water, soil and fertiliser practices on 2 million acres of its supplier land. This is just one example of the more than 100 water-related shareholder resolutions that have been filed over the last four years.

As investors further integrate water’s multiple economic and political dimensions into their analyses, companies are receiving clearer expectations from their shareholders. Increasingly, these expectations extend beyond disclosure of water data. Investors are pushing high-impact industries to protect and preserve fragile water ecosystems, achieve zero liquid discharge from factories, and support governments and local stakeholders in restoring degraded watersheds.

These higher expectations are timely and closely align with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, which seeks to ensure available and sustainable management of water for all people by 2030. Some fund managers are setting ambitious quantitative targets in this regard: witness ACTIAM, which has set out to achieve “water neutrality” for its $64 billion portfolio by 2030. ACTIAM defines water neutrality as investing in companies that “consume no more water than nature can replenish, and cause no more pollution than is acceptable for the health of humans and natural ecosystems”.

Water represents tremendous risks – and opportunities – for major companies and investors. Yet, most are still not paying enough attention to this increasingly material issue. Adam Smith’s Paradox of Value still holds water on Wall Street, for now, but the rationale for it is leaking more and more with each passing day.

Hugh W. Brown Jr. is a senior manager for investor engagement on water at Ceres.

 

Austria’s APK Pensionskasse is poised to increase its allocation to equity in response to buying opportunities that have emerged in recent months. Chief executive Christian Boehm says the multi-sector pension scheme is “taking a closer look” at different regions and sectors.

About one-third of the fund’s €5.5 billion ($6.3 billion) portfolio is invested in equity, although this sits at the low end of its trading range. In 2017, the trading range oscillated between 21 per cent and 41 per cent for equities, and 42 per cent and 64 per cent for bonds, APK’s annual report states, in a strategy shaped by constant surveillance and reaction to the capital markets.

“It is a little bit too early to start increasing our equity exposure, but we may in the second quarter if markets go down,” says Boehm, who also expects technological developments, particularly in the auto sector, and political uncertainty around Brexit and the US-China trade spat, to affect markets and present buying opportunities. He cautions, however, that he will wait to make any decision if there is “too much uncertainty”, noting as a key risk the pension fund’s exposure to the euro via its large European portfolio.

Although APK decides its own asset allocation within the equity portfolio, along with the passive/active split, all active equity management is outsourced and Boehm favours specialist managers. About one-third of the equity portfolio is passive; Boehm plans to increase the fund’s active management further in response to buying opportunities.

“In this environment, we believe active investment can make a lot of sense due to the changing underlying composition of the indices,” Boehm says. For example, he sees varying opportunities in the financial sector, where some European banks are healthier than others and better able to withstand enduring zero or negative interest rates.

“This is just the type of environment where active management works,” he enthuses.

The success of APK’s strategy has been reflected in its status as best performer in the mid-risk segment of the Austrian life-cycle model over three, five and 10 years, based on Mercer analysis. The consultancy tracked the performance of all six of the country’s multi-employer Pensionskassen over the three time periods.

The Pensionskassen offer funds in five different risk levels within the Austrian life-cycle model – defensive, conservative, balanced, active and dynamic – all defined by their equity exposures. For the conservative segment (with an equity quota of 16-24 per cent) APK came first over the three-year, five-year and 10-year periods. Investment strategies are selected either by the company for its employees or by the beneficiaries themselves. APK targets a return of between 2 per cent and 6.5 per cent, Boehm says. If the target isn’t met, the pension fund cuts its benefits. “We are always fully funded,” he says.

 

Inside alternatives

Assets in APK’s 10 per cent allocation to alternatives comprise private equity, real estate, hedge funds and private debt. In recent years, Boehm, who has been with APK since its creation in 1989 and became chief in 2002, has scaled back the hedge fund portfolio to “a single-digit allocation”, dropping fund-of-funds strategies in favour of single strategies dedicated to specific environments like equity long-short and certain arbitrage and distressed strategies.

“The single fund strategies we have implemented have been positive for our allocation,” he says.

In contrast, APK has increased its allocation to private equity incrementally, funded via a reduction in public equity. Boehm aims for private equity to replace about 10-15 per cent of the public equity exposure.

“This change has not been massive but has been increasing over time. Our public equity bias increases volatility, which you don’t get in private equity. We would never substitute the whole public equity portfolio, but [this reduction] does make sense in an environment like today,” Boehm explains.

The private debt allocation, which he describes as “useful in the past” has become increasingly expensive in today’s crowded market. The current challenge in this area is moving the needle as a small investor.

“As a small investor, you have to keep in mind the real investment case,” he says. Boehm also advises checking where the return is coming from in alternatives, particularly in private debt.

“Is it an alpha product dependent on manager skills and trading strategies or is it a strategy with a real investment case. Private equity has a real investment case but many other investments in the alternative space, where predicting the market isn’t possible, are often just pure trading strategies,” he says.

Fixed income

APK’s fixed income portfolio accounts for 50-60 per cent of assets under management. The portfolio is diversified, with allocations to European government bonds, investment-grade corporate bonds and high yield. Boehm has favoured investment-grade corporate bonds and high yield over low-yielding European government bonds for a long time but he is increasingly concerned about over-valuations in both high yield and investment-grade fixed income today.

“I am concerned about the volatility of high yield compared to equity,” he says. “It is a question of whether the spread is priced fairly or if there are over-valuations in these markets.”

The fund increased its allocation to investment-grade corporate bonds a couple of years back but took profits in 2018 because the spreads, especially in investment-grade European corporate bonds narrowed. Today, Boehm is concerned whether corporate bonds in the financial sector, like the fund’s equity stakes in financials, accurately reflect the risk of some banking names.

“After the financial crisis, the risk was priced into the financial sector. Europe’s financial sector is in better shape than it was seven years ago but not every bank is in good shape,” Boehm says. “We don’t want to be invested in one of those banks that are struggling. If there are extreme risks and this is undervalued, then it might dissuade us from investing altogether.”

For the last 15 months, I have chaired the Competition and Market Authority’s investigation into investment consultants and fiduciary managers. We began this investigation after the Financial Conduct Authority made a reference at the conclusion of its asset management market study.

Investment consultants and, increasingly, fiduciary managers, play a vital role in institutional investment in the UK, in particular with pension schemes. We estimate that investment consultants have influence over £1.6 trillion ($2 trillion) of UK pension scheme assets; fiduciary managers, despite having come into the sector much more recently, already manage more than £110 billion ($141 billion) of pension scheme assets. And they play an increasingly important role in advising defined-contribution (DC) schemes, which are growing as part of the overall pensions market.

Despite this, little has been known about these markets until now. Our investigation has helped shine a light on them and how well they are working.

Having explored the markets in depth, our conclusion is that many elements of them work well for pension scheme members, particularly as there is a good range of competing firms for pension trustees to choose from. We did not find that the markets were highly concentrated or that barriers to entry or expansion were prohibitively high.

Unfortunately, that does not mean competition is working well overall. In fact, our investigation concluded that there are competition problems in both markets that could result in substantial harm to pension schemes and their members; for example, they could lead to providers charging higher prices or performing worse.

We are, therefore, requiring that pension trustees and firms offering these services make some changes to how they work together.

Our greatest concern is in the fast-growing fiduciary management market. Some pension schemes may benefit by outsourcing the handling of their investments to a fiduciary manager but this service has high costs and represents a delegation of decision-making by pension trustees, most likely for a long time.

Moving to fiduciary management is a major step in how a pension scheme is run. It requires trustees to provide sufficient care and attention. However, in many cases, we found that this was not happening: two-thirds of pension trustees do not run a competitive tender when they first buy fiduciary management and half of them simply appoint the firm that was already their investment consultant.

This lack of customer engagement is not likely to produce the best market outcomes for pension schemes. It results in firms that offer both investment consultancy and fiduciary management having an incumbency advantage with their advisory clients. These firms can also have strategies and financial incentives in place to steer clients to their own fiduciary management service, instead of these clients shopping around for a provider that might suit them better.

It is too early in the development of the fiduciary management market to judge how frequently pension schemes will review or switch their provider. We have noted that both the monetary and time costs of switching would probably be significant, so we would not expect to see high levels of customer churn. This makes it even more important to have sufficient competition when a pension scheme first purchases fiduciary management.

We appreciate that pension trustees are subject to many regulatory and other responsibilities, which may go some way to explain why the cost and quality of investment advice and management have not received the focus we think they merit.

However, our analysis shows that pension trustees who do engage with these matters pay lower prices for fiduciary management than those who do not.

 

Recommended reforms

We have set out a package of reforms to tackle our competition concerns. Pension schemes must run a competitive tender with at least three firms before selecting their first fiduciary manager. If they already have a fiduciary manager but did not run a tender for the appointment, then they must do so within five years.

While pension schemes must bear the main responsibility for running these tenders, we will require firms to remind their current and prospective clients of their obligations.

We will also require that investment consultants separate marketing of their fiduciary management service from their paid-for investment advice to clients and they should label marketing as such. This will enable pension trustees to distinguish advice from marketing and ensure that they engage fully in choosing a fiduciary management provider.

Another finding of our investigation is that information for pension trustees on fees and quality of service of fiduciary management, and on the quality of investment consultants, is either limited or does not allow them to compare providers adequately.

We are, therefore, ordering fiduciary management firms to provide clear and comparable fees for current and prospective clients and to agree upon a performance standard based on their historic data amongst fiduciary management clients.

Pension trustees must also set strategic objectives for their investment consultants, most likely linked to the scheme’s investment performance. And we want clearer reporting of the performance of investment consultants and fiduciary managers’ asset manager recommendations.

These proposals complement and build upon new Markets in Financial Instruments Directives legislation and the recent work of the FCA’s institutional disclosure working group. We are keen to see greater engagement by the trustees of DC schemes in particular, as the members of those bear the risk of any under-performance in investments and we found some evidence that trustees of these schemes were less engaged in investment matters than trustees of defined-benefit schemes.

We think the FCA and The Pensions Regulator can play important roles in ensuring that these changes work well and that these markets work for the benefit of UK pension scheme members. So we have asked government to enable each regulator to take on the relevant duties and oversee our changes to the sector.

We expect these changes to be legally binding on firms and pension scheme trustees by the end of 2019.

John Wotton has chaired the Competition and Market Authority’s inquiry into investment consultants. He practised as a solicitor with Allen & Overy throughout his legal career, retiring in December 2012.

The drive to deliver greater cost transparency in the UK’s pensions industry has been gaining momentum for several years. It gathered pace with Markets in Financial Instruments Directives I and II and the increasing focus on value. Now the launch of the Cost Transparency Initiative has boosted it again.

CTI launched last November. It is a voluntary initiative being led by an independent industry group, supported by the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, the Investment Association (IA) and the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) advisory board.

This collaborative effort follows on from the Institutional Disclosure Working Group (IDWG) report to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in July 2018. The report recommended the formation of a group to encourage and support the use of cost transparency templates and monitor their use.

As its first step, the CTI will run a pilot phase to test user and main account-level templates covering most product types, and three sub-templates covering private equities, physical assets and ancillary services or custody. Following the pilot, CTI will gradually launch the templates with asset owners and asset managers, shining a light where lack of clarity and consistency have previously made it difficult for trustees to compare costs for a given fund or mandate. The supporting technical and communication materials will be developed through the pilot, ensuring asset managers have the information they need to complete the templates.

The FCA has welcomed the CTI, noting that it has the right experience, resources and market coverage to deliver results and build on the momentum the IDWG has created.

The Competition and Markets Authority has also supported the CTI. In its final report on the investment consultant market, in December, the authority recommended that fiduciary managers provide better and more comparable information to trustees on fees and performance, based on the templates.

In fact, the use of templates is already some way down the track among Local Government Pension Schemes. They have developed their own voluntary Code of Transparency for LGPS asset managers, working with the IA, to enable LGPS funds to obtain the data they require for listed assets. More than 65 asset managers have signed onto the code in its first year.

As the CTI develops, its staff will learn from, and build upon, that work to ensure the same strong uptake. In due course, the LGPS funds will transition to the IDWG templates the CTI is finalising, providing complete alignment across the pensions industry.

The pilot phase is now starting. CTI will be testing the five templates over the coming weeks. There has already been great uptake across asset managers and asset owners in support of the pilot. This testing prior to full launch will be particularly helpful for development of some of the more complex sub-templates, including for asset classes such as property.

The expectations of the regulators and government are rightly high in this area. It is important not only to encourage asset managers to report their costs and charges consistently and transparently, but also that the asset owners feel equipped to scrutinise and challenge what is reported to them; therefore, the CTI’s work on the demand side will be important. The initiative will work with pension schemes and trustees to advocate and promote the use of the templates through their asset manager selection and investment governance approaches.

The CTI will establish its board early in the new year and then will provide a fuller update on the activities of the pilot.

Mel Duffield is chair of the Cost Transparency Initiative and pensions strategy executive at the Universities Superannuation Scheme.

The $42 billion Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund plans to launch a new, internally managed quantitative portfolio using multifactor strategies in 2019. The new approach means the fund will add to its active internal equity management capability, hiring two portfolio managers and one trader. The allocation will be US-focused, but further details remain under wraps.

“It has been preliminarily approved in our budget, but the discussions are ongoing. [In 2019] we will go to the board with the specifics,” IMRF chief investment officer Dhvani Shah says.

The strategy builds on Shah’s gradual integration of more downside protection into the 44 per cent allocation to domestic US equity. So far, downside protection has mostly come via boosting cashflow-generating assets in an infrastructure allocation established in 2016. The new quantitative portfolio also reflects IMRF’s own growing investment expertise, where the internal team now stretches to 14, 11 of whom sit in investments.

It is an expertise evidenced by IMRF running its manager search in unlisted infrastructure internally, where Shah now hunts direct fund investment. Indeed, IMRF has carried out all its recent infrastructure searches itself, spanning five categories across the listed and unlisted spaces. In contrast, when Shah joined IMRF seven years ago from New York State Teachers’ Retirement System, where she headed up the private equity division, the fund didn’t run any inhouse investment searches or recommendations. Now IMRF has built a team that can do things itself and doesn’t need to use its consultant on every search.

“We can do things quicker ourselves,” Shah says. “We are the only client.”

Technology has helped IMRF build its internal capabilities. She has added Bloomberg and private equity software TopQ, amongst other tools.

“When I joined, if someone asked me how the portfolio did the day before, I couldn’t tell them until my consultant’s report came in. With the use of technology, I can see the portfolio and have the preliminary numbers when I need them,” Shah explains.

Other recent adjustments to the portfolio include tweaks at the edges of the asset allocation to help with implementation. For example, she recently reduced the allocation to alternatives by 1 per cent to better reflect the chunk of uncalled capital in the private equity portfolio, which had widened the gap between IMRF’s actual and target allocation.

“We reduced our alternative allocation not because of sentiment on the asset class but because the market value of our actual allocation was around 4 per cent, yet unfunded capital brings the allocation to about 7.7 per cent. As we deploy more capital, we will move back up.”

Less is more

Strategy in the alternative portfolio, which targets an annualised return of 9 per cent from allocations to private equity, venture capital, agriculture, timber and infrastructure, focuses on fewer GP relationships and direct allocations. It is a simple approach that led Shah to take hedge funds out of the alternative portfolio a couple of years ago, despite an initial decision when she joined the fund to rejuvenate the allocation by consolidating three fund-of-funds hedge fund products into one.

“The restructured hedge fund portfolio performed well and grew to around $500 million, but we had to either scale up hedge funds or reduce them and we made the decision to come out,” she recalls. “We only have a four-person team overseeing private markets. We were doing fund-of-funds but would have wanted to change this to direct control. Sourcing and monitoring hedge funds [requires] a larger team, but this didn’t match with our investment team model.”

She also says other strategies within allocations can give the same benefits as hedge funds. “There are niche strategies within each major asset class you can use to shape your risk-return profile of the portfolio.”

The private equity portfolio is structured around 20 direct GP relationships running about 55 mandates between them. Added to this, IMRF deploys capital to separate accounts for broader exposure. Success hinges on accessing the best funds; Shah believes IMRF has an edge as a “premier LP” because of its 93 per cent funded status, governance structure, reputation and ability to offer multiple mandates.

“We don’t have to invest in every private equity fund that comes our way. Our GPs are one of 20, not 200, and this makes a difference,” she says.

Within the fund’s private equity manager roster, a handful of minority managers also run mandates. It’s part of a wider program where minority managers invest about 20 per cent of the $40 billion portfolio across all asset classes, in a strategy underwritten by Illinois’ state-level pension code.

“Our minority managers are not a separate carve-out of the portfolio but are part of our performance and crucial to reaching our 7.5 per cent return,” Shah says. Most recently, IMRF mandated minority manager Piedmont Investment Advisors to run its $1 billion Russell 1000 Growth Fund. Piedmont used to run an active equity mandate for the fund, and wanted to grow into the passive space, Shah says.

“Our $1 billion investment mandate is a vote of confidence that they can do it.”

 

 

 

 

As of September 30, 2018

Market Value
ASSET CLASS (MILLIONS) % TARGET % ACTUAL
Domestic equity $18,958.6 37.0% 44.7%
International equity $8,138.5 18.0% 19.2%
Fixed income $10,915.6 28.0% 25.7%
Real estate $2,422.6 9.0% 5.7%
Alternative investments $1,704.6 7.0% 4.0%
Cash equivalents $271.8 1.0% 0.6%
Total $42,411.9 100% 100%

 

 

TOTAL INVESTMENTS BY REGION
Domestic: 76.5%
International: 23.5%

How much does it cost? It should be the most basic of questions from pension fund trustees when decisions are made about how to invest members’ assets, yet it appears this is often not the case. A lawsuit originating in the US state of Kentucky has the potential to change matters for the better.

Investment regulations for pension schemes in the UK take their lead from the European Union Directive on Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision. Investments must be made in the “best interests of scheme members and any potential conflict of interest must be resolved in their favour”.

The recent Law Commission review of UK fiduciary duty stated that managing the costs of a pension scheme was an essential requirement for trustees, particularly to help ensure that sponsors would remain committed. Yet few trustees even consider the costs incurred in the investment chain.

Are trustees asking, ‘How much does it cost?’ No one would dream of buying a new car or a fridge without knowing the costs and performances of particular models but, unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the decision-making at pension schemes. Trustees seem to ignore basic principles when using the resources of their members’ investment fund to buy assets.

To tell you the truth, it is a dirty secret – no one wants you to know the costs. Why aren’t we able to gain a simple answer to such a simple question? Having spent the last three years asking that for UNISON’s Local Government Pension Scheme members, I think the answer is manifold.

In my experience, a typical response is “costs do not matter, investment returns do”. Well not good enough I am afraid; the more it costs to manage your investments, the lower the returns. Or, put another way, the more electricity your fridge consumes, the more expensive it is to run.

In the UK, if you are in an auto-enrolment workplace pension scheme, the chances are that costs charged against your fund are way over the 0.75 per cent cap laid against your fund. But if the costs are above that, say 1 per cent, over 25 years, that will take a quarter of your money, resulting in less to live on in retirement.

Concerns that meagre pension benefits will force people into poverty after retirement have led Chilean workers to demand the nationalisation of the nation’s system. Throughout 2016 and 2017, several mass demonstrations were held in Chile’s largest cities in support of the cause.

The country’s fully private structure was designed by José Piñera, minister of labour and social security in the military government of Augusto Pinochet. Piñera was a member of the so-called Chicago Boys, a group of economists employed by Pinochet, most of whom had trained at the University of Chicago under prominent free-market economists such as Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.

This private system has spread around the world, replacing traditional defined-benefit systems, which deliver a living wage in retirement. In the UK, defined-contribution schemes must set out their charges but the method to collect themis not up to scratch. Meanwhile, the country’s 6000 defined-benefit schemes have no obligation to be transparent.

This lack of clarity means workers and their employers don’t know whether they’re getting value for money or how the investments that will fund their retirement are performing.

Imagine you went into a large retail shop and found no price tags. The first thing you would do is ask where the prices are. Consumer law would demand that they be there but for our pensions, perhaps the largest purchase we make without a loan, they are invisible.

 

Transparency works

The solution is for schemes to start using new transparency templates that are now available in the UK through the Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator of financial services. These are simple spreadsheets that all of the contractors a pension fund hires – such as fund managers, custodian banks and consultants – should fill out.

In the Netherlands, compulsory reporting was introduced three years ago and investment costs have since fallen by more than a third. Members and employers in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) will obtain this transparency next year, because UNISON demanded the same system.

We think it’s time the UK Government, which ensured workers were put into a pension scheme, offered the same system for all types of workplace saving. Then workers and their retired colleagues could see a much welcome boost to their pensions.

It is troubling to think that two workers in similar industries with similar wages might find themselves in vastly different situations at retirement because one was in a system with a lack of transparency on fees and their impact.

It’s a scandal. Just because members can’t see what happens every time they pay more into their pension fund does not mean nothing untoward is happening.

We should believe the members of the US’s Kentucky Retirement Systems. They have won an important lawsuit alleging breaches of fiduciary duty by certain trustees and executives of the system, along with fund managers KKR/Prisma, Blackstone and PAAMCO, which set up customised hedge funds that were sold as providing stellar performance at low risk and turned out to be turkeys.

The members scored an overwhelming victory despite the defendants, some of the richest and most powerful in the US, throwing their biggest legal guns at them.

The members plan to continue to prosecute the case vigorously. Given the potential to set important precedents, and the demonstrated effectiveness of the members’ attorneys in presenting complex factual and legal arguments, which would be particularly important in a jury trial, do not expect them to settle.

Public pension plans in the US, along with their counterparts across the globe, are under attack from the threat of closure. A full exposure of the ‘box of tricks’ employed against trustees by asset managers will be welcome by all. Scheme members should not have to use the force of law to gain cost transparency – it is their fiduciary right.

Trustees and public officials should demand this before they purchase an asset manager’s strategy and invest in assets. That fiduciary principle is in desperate need of a shot in the arm. We hope Kentucky will deliver that.

UNISON believes that’s the least members deserve. Find out about our work in the LGPS here.

 

Colin Meech is national officer of UNISON, the second-largest trade union in the UK, with almost 1.4 million members.