LGPS Central, Wolverhampton, England, has launched a stewardship service following an £11 billion ($14.4 billion) allocation to the pension plan from participating local pension funds, according to a news release.
LGPS Central is a local government pension scheme. In January, member pension funds appointed LGPS Central to provide oversight and stewardship services for £11 billion in passive funds managed by Legal & General, and previously overseen directly by the member funds.
The stewardship service will provide a unified proxy-voting approach, granting LGPS Central significant influence over governance and sustainability matters.
The stewardship service will cover more than 2,500 companies each year across 15 equity funds, with assets of about £8.8 billion. Including fixed-income allocations, the total allocation value rises to about £11 billion.
This service has been designed to complement LGPS Central’s existing stewardship activities, where the team already conducts proxy voting on behalf of £13.7 billion of assets across 3,100 companies.
The service is also intended to ease the governance burden on its member pension funds. All shares under pool management are voted in the same way, and the service will look to ensure that all stewardship activities are aligned to LGPS Central's stewardship strategy, which was developed with and approved by its member funds.
Progress will be reported at regular responsible investment working group meetings, as well as directly to member funds’ pension committees, and through regular stewardship reports.
LGPS Central’s stewardship now covers more than £23 billion across passive funds, including internally and third-party managed equity and fixed-income strategies.
The pension plan has a total of £43 billion in assets.
