The reorganisation of £260bn of UK townhall pension funds — about a 10th of the country’s total retirement assets — is now at crunch time.

For the past two years, the 89 council pension schemes in England and Wales have been scrambling to meet a 2015 edict by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne that they must consolidate their investments into centralised “pools”, to save on costs. Ministers have set next April as the deadline for these organisations to be up and running.