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It is not known how much of £487m MPs’ pension fund is invested in fossil fuels. Photograph: PA
It is not known how much of £487m MPs’ pension fund is invested in fossil fuels. Photograph: PA

Divest MPs' pension fund from fossil fuels, says Caroline Lucas

This article is more than 9 years old

Green party MP calls on parliament to pull money out of gas, coal and oil investments

MPs should follow in the footsteps of the Rockeller family, Glasgow University and churches around the world by pulling their pension fund investments out of fossil fuels, according to Caroline Lucas.

The Green party MP says the £487m Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund should join the movement of hundreds of institutions worldwide who have already divested $50bn (£31bn) from gas, coal and oil investments as a way of tackling climate change. A University of Oxford study says the campaign has grown faster than any previous divestment movements, including those on apartheid and tobacco.

Lucas has written to Brian Donohoe, the chairman of the fund’s trustees board, telling him that she is particularly concerned that the fund is contributing to global warming and of the economic risk to such assets if governments put in place “effective climate regulation”.

“MPs, parliament, should be demonstrating a positive way forward, it’s incumbent to make sure our house is in order. It’s not helpful if parliament is setting an example whereby we’re not shifting our pension funds to sustainable sources and inadvertently potentially accelerating climate change,” Lucas told the Guardian.

Last month, Glasgow became the first university in Europe to vote to pull its endowment out of fossil fuels. Students across the UK are lobbying universities to follow suit, including King’s College London where campaigners met the vice-principal last week and the School of Oriental and African Studies where a decision is expected later this year.

Lucas said the divestment campaign had benefited from comments by the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who said earlier this month that the “vast majority of reserves are unburnable.”

“There’s a strong economic reason [to divest] ... That these pension funds might not be performing as well as they might appear, once you factor in the fact that the investment in fossil fuels could well be unrealisable if we take seriously the fact we need to be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and stay below 2C warming,” Lucas said, adding that she expected the call to attract cross-party support.

Donohoe, a Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, said he did not think fossil fuels were an investment the fund should avoid, or pull out of.

“We’ve got to balance what individuals like she [Lucas] will say about certain investments... [with] the good of the fund. Now that doesn’t mean to say we go down an amoral road, with tobacco or whatever else, clearly we don’t. But fossil fuels is something else completely. I just don’t think that’s an issue in itself that we would want to avoid any form of investment [in].”

He added that his personal view was that Lucas was a lone voice on the issue. “I don’t know what she’s talking about frankly. If she’s talking about stopping taking coal out of the earth, that would have to be universally applied, there’d be a closure to all coal-fired power stations. That would have quite a significant impact on Soctland and perhaps elsewhere. I don’t know where she’s coming from on this one.”

The fund does not disclose how much of its value is invested in fossil fuels.

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