News

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.