Andy Burnham may have been too busy to notice during April and May that, in his own backyard, it started to emerge that the Greater Manchester Pension Fund had just declared the biggest funding surplus in Local Government history:

£7.1 Billion

And this was a figure more than a year old.

Then Labour-controlled Tameside council, which runs the fund, worked out for March 31st 2025 that all of the pensions it will ever have to pay out to current pensioners, and future pensions to its current employees, was now £25.1 billion. The managers scratched their head, looked at how much they had in the bank (£32.2 billion) and realised they’d got £7.1 billion more than they should have.

That £7.1 billion will never, ever, be used to pay a pension. It just sits there.

It is literally surplus to requirements. But rather than ‘fessing up and getting this money back into the economy of the region it came from, they doubled down and, substantially, decided to keep the surplus ticking over on its own books.

The fund deals with pensions and pension savings across the region: councils, yes, but also non-teachers in all state schools and most universities, all FE college staff, and all of the non-uniformed staff in Andy Burnham’s own Police and Fire Services; and his transport authority. His own staff at the Greater Manchester Mayoral authority are in it too. So with the police and fire, and Transport, Andy is himself (currently) owed quite a bit.

It was a scandal that the £7.1B had happened.

It’s an even bigger scandal that they are not giving it back. We will point out later the further scandal of how much the fund is handing over in investment management fees.

The problem is, in a few weeks’ time it will get even worse. Because the pension payout calculation is pretty much the same, but the assets in the bank will have continued their inexorable rise to likely £35.5B, at least, (on a conservative estimate of a 10% increase this year to March 31st 2026).

That means the surplus has now ballooned to…..(wait for it)……

£10.4 billion.

The easy way of finding this out is simply for Tameside Council to tell us now what the assets were on 31st March 2026. They have to publish this next month anyway.

Or Andy Burnham could just simply ask them and then tell the rest of us.

If the surplus isn’t returned, and pronto, then this time next year, if assets increase by 7% (the 10, 20 and 30-year LGPS annualised average investment return), the assets will be £38B, and the surplus will likely be….

£13 billion.

The Fund’s own report this year (above) showed how in 2022 the surplus was already £1 billion. It was £7 billion last year and is likely £10.4 billion this year. It’s not difficult to see  why it wouldn’t be £13 billion next year?

It has become a runaway train crashing into the economy of Greater Manchester, when it could instead become a huge generator of economic growth and poverty-reduction.

The only way of dealing with this is to tell the employers and taxpayers across Greater Manchester they can have *their* money back, by massively cutting councils’ and the other state-employers contributions. We and a growing number of other enlightened challenger pensions actuaries would assert 0% for the next three years is the only way forward. And probably no more than 6% for the following three years.

It’s not a contributions holiday, it’s an acknowledgement that they have prepaid the next 3-6 years contributions already, by the pension fund asking them to pay too much over the last 10 years. They had a chance to start three years ago and didn’t.

If not, the surplus will simply grow and grow.

One of the main reasons for this is that the GMPF is a pension fund that effectively  never pays out any pensions. Because the employer contributions have been set so high that they cover the pensions paid out over time each year.

For the ten years to 2025, the GMPF has taken in £7.8B in employer and employee contributions but paid out just £7.7 billion in pensions and lump sums. So, the asset base never gets touched for pensions, never mind the surplus. Consequently, the asset base, and the surplus, just keeps growing.

Ultimately the surplus belongs to the taxpayer. This is not like a private defined benefit pension fund. The right to be paid defined pensions comes under state regulations as a state pension scheme, not under the terms of a pension fund deed/instrument.

Indeed it is the job of an LGPS fund under the regulations to keep assets balanced against the total future pensions bill: big surpluses are a sign of incompetence, not success.

Based on the assets share of the fund declared in their 2025 accounts, here’s how the surplus is ‘owned’ or ‘owed’ across the region

Andy Burnham needs to decide whose side is he on here: the pension fund run by Tameside Council and its investment managers, or the people of Greater Manchester?

If the surplus is £10.4 billion this year (please ask what it is, Andy) then Greater Manchester’s 2.3 million adults are owed almost £4,000 each by the Tameside Council-run Greater Manchester Pension Fund, after deducting the National Probation Service section.

105,000 of them live in Makerfield, so the constituency’s adults are owed a whopping £420 million, and it could be more. That should be being spent in all Makerfield’s primary and secondary schools (which might buy some more teachers to make parents’ choices of schools easier, Andy) and in its FE College, Wigan and Leigh College. It should be spent on policing, Fire and Rescue and transport.

In fact, Andy Burnham, in response to a question about making tough choices, made a point that he had made tough choices in relation to increasing the police precept higher than elsewhere in the country. Well, if he’d challenged the pension fund on behalf of the police he might not have had to. The police service is owed £410 million from the surplus.

Wigan Council itself and its LEA-Maintained schools are owed almost £0.6 billion from the surplus.

Manchesterism looks pretty lame if its own Manchester City Council is owed £1.2 billion, which should be in its economy instead.

Votes from the other Labour GM councils means that Labour controls the fund, even though it lost control of Tameside Council. Does Andy think this money should come back or stay at Tameside Council to be played with by investment Managers?

And there’s the rub: investment managers charge big to play with this money.

Last year the fund deducted £125 million from the fund in just one year for ‘management expenses’. We estimate it’s likely £135 million for 2025-26. So, over the last 5 years, it’s £590 million deducted quietly from the fund for expenses.

In the last 10 years (GMPF have yet to restate the actual fees due when the rules changed about reporting real levels) so we estimate the deduction now to have been £1 BILLION in management expenses.

80% of management expenses are actually investment banking expenses.

Over the last 10 years, £900 million has been deducted from the fund and handed over to investment bankers.

Without this, the surplus would have been even bigger.

These management expenses are paid directly through deductions from the employer contributions. So Greater Manchester taxpayers pay for this directly from the budget of its councils, schools, FE Colleges, its police fire and transport services.

the GMPF admitted this in its last annual report:

Now that is a scandal.

GMPF will no doubt bring the usual playground defence that “everyone else is doing it”, otherwise known as the Tom Jones Defence: “ It’s not unusual”. We think that’s not good enough.

The UK's LGPS assets are now over £0.5 Trillion. Its management expenses will have hit £3 billion this last year.

Unlocking this Secret Wealth Garden, especially its surplus of £250 billion which is owned by and to the taxpayer anyway, and putting it to work at the most local levels in the UK economy is a radical policy waiting to happen.

Most of the pensions paid out by the LGPS are to old women in poverty in all of our most local communities. Most receive a pension of little more than £4,000 a year. But the fund pays £3 billion a year in management expenses.

Pick a side, Andy. Pronto.