UK - The £3.6bn (€5.3bn) London Pension Fund Authority (LPFA) is considering changes to its socially-responsible investment (SRI) strategy.

The LPFA hinted, in its annual report, at new 'pioneering changes' over the following year without giving any details at this point in time.

"We are also using our considerable influence to force the pace of change in the area of socially-responsible investments and will introduce pioneering changes in the next 12 months," the organisation's chairman Neil Newton said.

LPFA's chief executive Mike Taylor pointed out his predecessor Peter Scales is still "making a significant contribution to the pensions sector and the issue of climate change".

Scales stepped down as CEO of the LPFA last year and is now a board member at EPIC investment advisers.

Taylor also noted the LPFA was on its way to moving "from being a 'good' to an 'excellent' organisation", adding "we are not quite there yet, as there are still many things to be done, but we are moving in the right direction".

The authority also noted in its annual report the new investment strategy implemented at the beginning of last year was "successful and exceeding targets" although it was still "early days in which to judge a long term strategy", as Newton put it.

Early last year, the LPFA set out to match the pensioner's liability directly by a cash flow matching strategy. Furthermore, it started using a core exposure to global equities and then a mixture of target return funds and alternative assets to diversify risk in the active members part of the fund replacing bonds.

Other parts of the report, including more details on the SRI strategy, have yet to be cleared by the auditors and will be published in early September.

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