Under pressure from governments, industry lobby groups, advisers and their own scheme members, pension fund trustees are increasingly exploring whether infrastructure investment can provide an alternative set of assets that will match their liabilities and/or their expected cash outflows.

Paul Jayasingha, a senior investment consultant at Towers Watson, said: "More and more of our clients are looking to de-risk, and they want matching assets that are cheaper than index-linked gilts. Infrastructure and real estate investments are not going to match liabilities in the way that index-linked gilts do - the price does not move in the same way and the discount rates used to estimate pension liabilities are linked to the gilt rate - but they have cashflow-matching characteristics that pension schemes want."