How does the CIV fit in with the government’s desire for commitment to funding from local government pension funds?
There was a paragraph in the latest Budget statement which basically said the government wants every LGPS fund to come forward with proposals for collaboration. We are expecting to see criteria about what it expects this to look like any time now, but it appears one of the criteria might be something around scale so things that perhaps look like the London CIV but are not necessarily structured the same. The government is looking for scale between £25bn and £30bn which given there is about £180bn in LGPS assets, suggests a maximum of six collaborative structures.
Would you work in collaboration with the Pensions Infrastructure Platform (PiP)?
A lot of our members are very interested in getting into infrastructure as an asset class but we have not done a huge amount of thinking around it. PiP could potentially be one route into infrastructure but we need to look at what is out there in this space and members will ultimately need to take decisions about how they want us to roll it out as an asset class. If PiP comes through that is absolutely fine, but it is early days. Infrastructure can be complex and expensive to get into, but if boroughs decide to do so on a collaborative basis through the CIV the cost of entry per borough immediately drops because they are sharing that cost.
How will you judge performance?
Many boroughs already have really good performance and I am not going to say we will outperform the best in London, but we will have a range of mechanisms for monitoring performance and will report through to the CIV board and will be open to scrutiny. Performance will be measured sub-fund by sub-fund rather than across the CIV as a whole.
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