Tony Poulter wants to repay the faith investors have shown in the Pensions Infrastructure Platform (PiP) during his term as chairman, he told portfolio institutional.
He took on the role in December and targets making the right impact for the organisation’s members in helping to develop the UK’s infrastructure.
“We are focused on doing the right deals and managing the assets with the right medium to long-term ambition,” he said. “What we are not going to do is focus on growing assets under management without paying attention to doing deals at the right price and managing the assets well.”
Poulter (pictured), who brings three decades of infrastructure investment experience to the organisation, has a number of items at the top of his agenda.
“Deal flow is important,” he said, but so is getting the pricing right and putting the correct arrangements in place to manage the assets. Then there is making sure that he has the right pipeline of deals.
PiP’s investment team is seeing a number of deals in the market so there is a good pipeline of prospective investment opportunities, he said.
PiP has closed two deals since Poulter first sat in the chairman’s office. One was in solar and the other in student accommodation.
Further deals are on the horizon and PiP is raising new capital to add to the £200m it is currently managing. The goal is to have at least £500m when this funding round closes in the first half of 2018. “We have a [funding] pipeline,” he said. “It always takes time.”
The size of the UK’s infrastructure market is difficult to define, but Poulter believes it could easily run into “several hundred billions of pounds when you look at the trophy projects”.
Of this he believes that the government is paying its fair share, quoting a report that claims Downing Street invests around 50% of current funding into the sector. “I would say broadly yes, that the government is investing enough in UK infrastructure,” he added.
