Interview – Wiltshire Pension Fund


INTERVIEW – JENNIFER DEVINE


“We are interested in real world change, not just making ourselves look squeaky clean.”


The head of the Wiltshire Pension Fund tells Andrew Holt about private assets, building net- zero portfolios, looking to the future and trying to keep one step ahead of the government.


What’s in your portfolio? We are just over £3bn in assets and are pretty well funded. In the 2022 valuation, we came out at just over 100%. With gilt yields going up last year, our liabilities have come down and we are now around 120% funded. We are in quite a strong position at the moment. We are in a phase of consolidation. In the three years prior to this, we introduced private markets for the first time. We have had property for a long time, but we have


12 | portfolio institutional | July-August 2023 | Issue 125


introduced private equity and private debt. They were new asset classes for us and we have been building them up slowly. They deliver similar risk-return characteristics. We also have active equities through a bal- anced style portfolio and a sustainable one. We made the sustainable allocation off the back of our climate scenario modeling that showed it would give us better returns. But it is growth orientated, so we have not put all of our active equities into it. We just went for a 50/50 split. We have Paris-


aligned passive equities as well, which is quite exciting. That’s aligned to a bench- mark we developed with our pool, Brunel Pension Partnership. We also hold some emerging market exposure. Emerging markets have quite a high carbon footprint and we could divest from that, but we are not willing to. We want to stay invested in these areas because we are interested in real world change, not just making ourselves look squeaky clean.


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