London Lord Mayor aims to put Muslim life at heart of City events

Alastair King hosts Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Thursday for the launch of reforms to unleash investment billions

Alastair King, Lord Mayor of the City of London, is flying to GCC countries next week.

Alastair King, the new Lord Mayor of the City of London, has invited the finance and services firms to bring the Muslim community to the heart of the working day, particularly during Ramadan when he is planning to lead a programme of official iftars.

Mr King's invite for iftar at the Guildhall is set for an upgrade to a centrepiece of the year-long term at the helm of the financial centre. Mr King is proud of his links to the GCC region and his first visit in office before the end of this month will be Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait.

By launching 15 City Belonging Networks, including the Muslim chapter in the first tranche of four, Mr King is looking to build links – he describes the networks as a glue – between the “remarkable communities” that consider London as their base.

“For the first time in some years, the holy month of Ramadan is not at the height of summer so effectively, we will be getting towards sunset during the end of the working day where iftar can occur,” he pointed out to The National. “That gives a great opportunity for companies to celebrate iftar with their own employees.

“And why not bring in some of the schools in the area where there's a higher preponderance of Muslim peoples and students.”

Reaching out to the young could help with another ambition for Mr King, to tap talent that should not feel excluded from the elite services industries. “That's where I'd like to see the talent to come from to power financial and professional services over the course of the next 25 years here in London,” he said.

Speaking in the Lord Mayor's parlour, Mr King, a Scot by birth, is hours away from one of the biggest events of the year. The Mansion House speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is always a big occasion. This year sees the debut of the new Labour minister Rachel Reeves, who launched a series of reforms to harness investment funds for British growth.

Mr King's vision for his role is to “Unleash Growth” and views the country and the City as having lost sight of how to incentivise people to invest their money into productive assets. He likes to say that despite his domain stretching to 1.2 miles there should be no limit to the City's ambitions and that includes jumping on planes to engage with high-growth markets.

Since the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the British economy has underperformed relative to the historical trend. The City-backed Capital Markets Industry Taskforce said in a recent report that £100 billion ($130 billion) of fresh investment every year would be needed to put the country on track to achieve 3 per cent annual growth.

GCC visits by the former lord mayors of London - in pictures

Ms Reeves is targeting greater investment from the establishment of a mega-pension industry by forcing local government funds to merge in a £400bn big bang that would be boosted by consolidation of smaller employer pensions into bigger funds. With the moves, she thinks she can unleash £80bn of annual UK investment to boost the economy's growth rate.

Mr King, who is a prominent fund manager, would go further and call for a shake-up of the tax domestic saving platforms, known as ISAs which he says funnels £250bn of UK household savings into non-productive assets tax-free.

As a former secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on sovereign wealth funds, he sees the reform package opening up new partnerships for investment with regions like the GCC, which has large capital pools to send overseas.

“We need to see British pension funds leading the big investment rounds,” he says. “At the moment, you very rarely hear a British pension fund being the cornerstone investment on some of these major projects.

“So it upgrades the UK landscape for outside interests,” he says. “Foreign investors can take comfort in the chef eating his own cooking. We're investing ourselves with some foreign partners.”

During the forthcoming trip, which is one of four planned for the region over the next year, Mr King will get to mark 125 years of the relationship with Kuwait. He bemoans the recent decision by BA, the UK flag carrier, to cut its regular services to both Kuwait and Bahrain as he wants all British businesses to be including all GCC countries in their growth strategies.

A separate process of overhauling the UK's stock market rules and capital market regulations is also a positive that Mr King wants to highlight during his missions. A host of “ill-fitting” rules have already gone.

A boost to the “growth market” for Sukuk products is one ambition that Mr King is keen on, having been a pioneer in the market. This Islamic product has he notes 14 different iterations in the religion and offers a sophisticated opportunity for the City. “London has traditionally taken a fragmented market and created an orderly market,” he said. “There is now enough issuance that a viable secondary market in some of these securities is now possible.”