The IFG Election 2024 Pledges

For our UK readers, we are going to have elections in 2024 and as a Muslim community we need to ensure that we are holding our politicians to account.

There are a broad, high level set of pledges that the Community Policy Forum have put forward for the Muslim community as a whole.

At IFG we have been closely involved with a number of Islamic finance and money-related political campaigns over the years and we wanted to unpack the “Money” section further.

The below are more detailed finance, investment and money-specific pledges that expand on the “Money” Community Policy Forum pledges:

The pledges

1. ⅓ of Muslims in the UK do not currently have a pension due to the absence of sharia-compliant pensions. This will cost the taxpayer billions in the coming decades and is a major source of economic inequity.
   1. Commit to issuing Treasury guidance to employers that they must provide a sharia compliant pension otherwise they will be contravening Equality law.
   2. Commit to committing 7% of the LGPS and other public sector pension pots to ethical and sharia-compliant investments and fund managers, reflecting the Muslim population and ESG goals.  
2. Maintain the existing government’s pledge to deliver Alternative Student Finance as soon as possible and latest by 2025.
3. Require the British Business Bank to report on the ethnic and religious diversity of its recipient companies and managers, and commit to increasing the BBB’s funding of sharia-compliant investments or managers to 7%, in line with the UK Muslim population. Require the British Business Bank to ensure sharia-compliant equivalents for all of its funding products.
4. Commit to introducing a new regulated activity of “managing a shared ownership purchase plan” to ensure that shared ownership sharia-compliant home financing products get the same tax treatment as Islamic mortgages and come under the regulated umbrella. 
5. Acknowledge that the majority of investing solutions available to Muslims today are in the private markets and that access to private markets has been made progressively tighter by the Treasury, leading to an inequity in accessing investments for  Muslims. Commit to easing the onboarding and marketing requirements for low risk private markets investments for all investors.
6. Ensure that all current and future home ownership schemes introduced by the government – such as right to buy and others – have a sharia-compliant equivalent – or the scheme itself is set up to be sharia-compliant out of the box.
7. Ensure insurance premiums do not discriminate against ethnic minorities.

What you should do with these?

These are high level pledges to inform politicians on what specific policies around money, finances and investment that the Muslim community deeply cares about. You should make your candidates in your local area aware of these policies and ask them if they will agree to back them.