Rachel Reeves’ investing campaign must put savers’ interests first

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As part of a package of reforms earlier this month to get Britain investing, the government has announced it will launch an advertising campaign, backed by high street banks and other major financial firms, to ‘help explain the benefits of investing’.

It will go hand in hand with upcoming ‘targeted support’, which will allow financial companies to ‘alert customers about specific investment opportunities’.

Our view: If this campaign helps to educate Brits on the benefits of investing, as well as helping them understand the potential risks, that can only be a good thing – and getting banks involved could hugely increase this positive outreach to millions more savers.

However, the government has made it clear on multiple occasions that it wants to attract more money into the UK stock market to help boost the economy, and this is likely to be, at least in part, a motive behind this campaign.

This is a critical time to ensure savers are fully educated on investing – but they aren’t going to be interested in how this benefits the economy, they only care about how much money they have in their pocket at the end of the day.

The government must make sure it prioritises the viewpoint of investors through this campaign, rather than allowing its focus to be on the benefit to the economy, if it wants to a) engage savers and b) avoid a disaster down the line if stock markets tumble.

There’s a great article in The Guardian on this topic.