Fee pressure from pension funds and consultants is telling on infrastructure fund managers, according to new research, which has found that their average fee has dropped from 2% of invested assets per year to 1.5% in the past couple of years.

The figures, from the analysts Preqin, suggest that the managers of private infrastructure funds, who have inherited their typical fee structures from the world of private equity, are conceding to investors' arguments that infrastructure should in general be a safer, lower-returning and hence lower-fee type of investment.