LONDON — U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering launching a refreshed version of a Thatcher-era advertisement campaign to save the ailing London Stock Exchange.
Multiple senior City figures told POLITICO they have been contacted by the London Stock Exchange Group — the company that runs the London stock market — to sign up for a “hearts and minds” campaign to convince the public to move their cash savings into British stocks and shares.
It comes as the stock exchange continues to struggle with an exodus of companies leaving for greener pastures in the U.S. due to depressed valuations and a lack of capital. According to the IG Group, 88 firms left the LSE last year compared to just 18 that joined.
The chancellor had weighed up cutting the tax-free Cash ISA allowance to get more savers to invest, with the Treasury saying in the March spring statement it wants to “get the balance right between cash and equities to earn better returns for savers, [and] boost the culture of retail investment.”
But Reeves has since backed down from that plan, according to reports.
The chancellor and the LSEG have been inspired by the 1986 “Tell Sid” campaign that was launched after the privatization of British Gas when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, which helped boost the number of Brits that held shares from just five percent to 19 percent across the 80s and 90s.
One director at a major investment platform said the idea had been “doing the run around for quite a while” and there was now a “certain amount of industry coordination that’s going on behind the scenes” to bring the idea to life. Like others quoted in this report, they were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the plans.
‘Multi-year campaign’
The director said that the campaign could run around the end of the tax year next April, when most retail investors make decisions about where to allocate their savings, and it is likely to be about investing as a whole rather than urging savers to take a stake in one private company like the original campaign.
However, the timings of an announcement are unclear. Another policy director at a trading platform said they were contacted by an LSEG executive who told them it could be mentioned at Mansion House next week, but they admitted it was still “in the early stages” of planning.
“They’re [the LSEG] talking a multi-year always-on campaign and are trying to get brokers to sign up,” they said.
“There have been some general conversations, but there’s been no assignment of roles as yet,” said a separate director at a financial services trade body involved in the plan.
But in an interview with POLITICO last week, the City of London Corporation’s policy chair, Chris Hayward, said the LSEG is planning to run “a campaign on retail investment very, very shortly.”
Some high-street banks have been calling for a retail investment advertisement blitz in recent months, and in May, the Building Societies Association urged the chancellor to replicate the 1960s New York Stock Exchange campaign.
When asked about the plan, an LSEG spokesperson declined to comment, noting remarks by its CEO last month that “now is the time to have a long-term public campaign that would demystify investing.” A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment.
When Reeves does announce a campaign, it will fulfill a Labour pledge from its financial services manifesto that was published in the run-up to the election.
It would also be a copy and paste of a former government policy. In 2023, then-Chancellor Jeremy Hunt floated creating a new “Tell Sid” campaign centered around the sell-off of the government’s NatWest shares, but it was eventually scrapped.
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