Wales Pension Fund

About Us

The Wales Pension Partnership (WPP) was established in 2017. The WPP is a collaboration of the eight LGPS funds (Constituent Authorities) covering the whole of Wales and is one of eight national Local Government Pension pools.

We have a long, successful history of collaboration, including examples that pre-date the Government’s pooling initiative. We are proud of our unique identity as a Pool – our Constituent Authorities represent and span the entirety of Wales. Being democratically accountable means we provide the best of strong public sector governance and transparency.

Our operating model is designed to be flexible and deliver value for money. We appointed an external Operator and make use of external advisers to bring best of breed expertise to support the running of the Pool. The Operator is Waystone Management (UK) Limited and they have partnered with Russell Investments to manage the investments and assist in the reduction of investment management costs for all the Constituent Authorities.

We have a clear vision and are in control of the pace we take to ensure we meet our goals.

Latest Notices

Latest News

Friday 23 February 2024

Signatory to the UK Stewardship Code

We are delighted to announce that the Wales Pension Partnership (WPP) remains a signatory to the UK Stewardship Code.

https://www.frc.org.uk/investors/uk-stewardship-code/uk-stewardship-code-signatories

The 2020 UK Stewardship Code sets a high bar for stewardship, a standard which the Wales Pension Partnership (WPP) seeks to meet through its approach to responsible investment (RI). We are therefore delighted to have retained our signatory status for 2023.

A key focus of our work over the year was the development of new Sub-Funds, including our Sustainable Active Equity Sub-Fund, which we launched in July 2023. We also broadened our fund range through the appointment of private-markets allocators across private debt, infrastructure and private equity asset classes, and we were also pleased to extend our low-carbon overlay to our UK Opportunities Sub-Fund.

Stewardship of our assets is also critical, working closely with both Robeco and Russell Investments to ensure our voice is being heard. On our behalf, Robeco voted on more than 15,000 resolutions and undertook over 200 corporate engagements across 20 separate themes. To facilitate our stewardship, we developed an updated Stewardship Framework, which provides additional focus on the themes and topics of interest to our members.

While we are pleased with how far we have come this year, we recognise that there is still much more to do. Over recent months, we have progressed work on an escalation strategy, further considered how we can better evolve stewardship within our passive allocations and updated our stock-lending policy to ensure that we vote on the entirety of our shareholdings. We also completed our inaugural All-Wales Climate Report, which we expect to publish shortly.

We remain proud of our identity as a pool, where we will continue to evolve in collaboration with all eight Constituent Authorities within Wales – and the members of their pension schemes – to be effective stewards of their assets.

Wales Pension Partnership invests in the development of onshore wind Energy Parks in Wales

The Wales Pension Partnership (WPP) will invest c.£68m into the development of onshore wind Energy Parks being developed in Wales, delivering ethical investments, and contributing to the wellbeing of future generations in Wales – as well as meeting Welsh Government targets on local and shared ownership of renewable energy projects.

This project will help deliver clean green energy to the people of Wales and beyond, addressing some of this generation’s biggest challenges and help to create a better world for future generations. This investment will contribute to the Welsh Government’s targets for electricity to be 100% renewable by 2035 and contribute to targets for 1GW of renewable electricity and heat capacity to be locally owned by 2030.

Once operational, the Energy Parks are expected to deliver approximately £800m of Community Benefit Funding to the communities living closest to the projects and will generate enough clean, green electricity to offset more than 2.6 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions a year – equivalent to c.7% of Wales’s total greenhouse gas emissions.