PensionBee survey: savers reject UK home-bias mandate on returns
PensionBee, the London-listed consumer retirement platform managing approximately £8.6 billion in assets, has published survey data suggesting the UK government faces a credibility problem with its pension investment mandation agenda. Of 1,354 savers polled across its two default funds in July and August 2026, 61% said they simply want the best returns available globally, against just 21% who would support a tilt towards domestic UK assets.
The findings land at a politically charged moment. The government has written mandation powers into the Pension Schemes Act 2026, building on the Mansion House Accord, granting it a reserve power to compel workplace defined contribution (DC) schemes to increase their allocation to UK assets. That legislative lever now sits ready to be pulled, even as PensionBee's data suggests the retail savers actually bearing the risk are largely unconvinced.
The conditions attached to any home bias
Even among the minority who would welcome more UK investment, support is heavily conditional. Of that group, 52% said they would only back a domestic tilt if it did not reduce their returns, and 31% wanted better tax incentives as a precondition. Only 16% of those broadly open to UK investment said they would accept lower returns as a consequence, meaning, across the full sample, barely 3% of savers would actively support a return-diluting home-bias mandate.
Clare Reilly, Chief Investment Solutions Officer at PensionBee, put it directly: "If savers are telling us that they don't want their retirement pots steered towards the UK unless it leaves them better off, then these insights may give the Government pause for thought. Without a clear returns rationale or other tax incentives to sweeten the deal for savers in the workplace, then they are asking ordinary savers to shoulder the long-term consequences of decisions made for them, not by them."
The survey also reveals what savers do care about on stewardship: ending child and forced labour ranked first (47%), followed by paying real living wages (38%), fair tax practices (27%), and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (26%), a ranking that places labour rights well ahead of climate concerns in the priorities of this particular cohort.
The wider convergence: capital allocation, sovereign ambition, and digital retirement
The PensionBee survey crystallises a tension that extends far beyond one UK platform. Across Europe and the Gulf, governments are increasingly attempting to channel private long-term savings towards domestic strategic priorities, whether that is UK productive finance, French industrial reindustrialisation, or GCC sovereign infrastructure. In each case, the underlying conflict is the same: retail savers' fiduciary interests versus states' capital-allocation ambitions.
For investors watching the UK fintech and wealthtech landscape, the numbers carry a second signal. PensionBee reports 84% satisfaction across both default plans, a figure that reflects its globally diversified mandate. The UK currently represents roughly 3% of global equity markets by capitalisation, the weighting PensionBee mirrors in its all-equities Global Leaders Plan. Any government-imposed domestic uplift would, by definition, constitute an overweight relative to market weight, and savers appear to understand that trade-off.
The broader capital-allocation question is also a technology question. As digital pension platforms scale, PensionBee serves approximately 327,000 customers and is listed on the London Stock Exchange, the data they accumulate on revealed saver preferences becomes a policy input that legacy occupational schemes cannot easily replicate. Governments seeking to redirect long-term savings flows will need to reckon with these digitally-native cohorts, whose expectations are shaped by transparency, real-time performance dashboards, and global benchmarks rather than domestic political narratives.