'Very fortunate': Meet the Yorkshirewoman managing £120bn of local government pensions from Leeds HQ

As CEO of the Leeds-based Border to Coast Pensions Partnership, her team of 250 people have the weighty responsibility of managing almost £120bn of assets for two million members – with their work dedicated to investing money wisely to fund council employees’ pension payments for generations into the future and protecting local taxpayers in the process.

Its spending power also allows the partnership to financially back a huge array of different projects; with one recent example being providing forward funding for a new 16-storey hotel on the former Leeds International Swimming Pool site.

“I’d love to somehow get across to young people just how interesting my career has been – I just love what we do here,” the CEO of the Leeds-based Border to Coast Pensions Partnership reflects. “It was one of my desires to create an organisation that I would have wanted to have been a part of when I was a graduate.

“I do feel very fortunate that I have had the opportunity to be able to do this with a great group of people, not just in Leeds and across Yorkshire, but right throughout the country.”

The organisation has recently become the largest pensions asset owner in the UK after adding seven extra Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) funds to its existing pool of 11. It has added Cambridgeshire, East Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Northamptonshire, and West Sussex to existing members including South Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, East Riding and Lincolnshire and all the way up to Tyne and Wear and Durham.

The change is part of an ongoing reorganisation of council pension funds which was kickstarted by George Osborne more than a decade ago at a point where they were being administered by 89 separate local government administering authorities. Pooling resources through the creation of what was envisioned as ‘up to six British Wealth Funds’ was designed to make the system more efficient and bring about benefits of scale.

Border to Coast was created in 2018 in response, starting out by managing around £10bn. The number of national pools was recently cut from eight to six, with the additions to Border to Coast coming as a result of the consolidation as Labour seeks to build on Osborne’s reforms by making more of the ‘untapped potential’ of the £392bn held in local government funds. But it has recently stepped back from plans to end up with a single national pool.

Elwell says she is happy with the current size and scope of the organisation. “There is such a thing as ‘too big’,” she says. “You don’t want to be a supertanker who every time you want to invest, you move the market. We’re still away from that.”

But the additional scale of the organisation is already opening doors. Following its expansion, Border to Coast has been invited by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to join a summit of 100 of the world's biggest investors taking place in Toronto this September.

Elwell has led Border to Coast since its inception and says it has been particularly meaningful to grow the organisation in her native Yorkshire.

Born in Sheffield, and still a keen Sheffield Wednesday fan, as the daughter of two teachers she grew up in Ackworth near Pontefract and after studying Mathematics at Cambridge went onto work for PwC and Royal London, taking charge of pension arrangements in the latter company. She had already moved back up north to have children when the chance came up to lead Border to Coast.

“I live in Hebden Bridge, which is equidistant between my parents and my husband’s parents, and this opportunity came up to set this up in Leeds and it felt serendiptious.

“It is rare CEOs get to do different phases at the same company. For the first three or four years, this was a start-up. It was start-up with a good funding source and very understanding stakeholders in our partner funds, but nevertheless, there was a lot of building the capabilities and the processes and the team and an identity and a culture. We're in a growth phase now.”

She says benefits of pooling have including being able to do direct investing in real estate and provide innovative backing to British projects. “We launched what we call our ‘UK Opportunities Fund’ a few years ago, which is working to put capital into the UK in a way that absolutely gives financial returns, but also provides what we call ‘additionality’, so that might be new housing stock or new energy capacity or investing in more medium-sized enterprises, so that they've got funding to create new jobs."

She says getting the strategy right means not only supporting local government workers – who are often low-paid – into retirement, but also ensures councils “can spend on the things they really need to, whether it is looking after children and adults with needs or libraries or collecting bins.”

Despite West Yorkshire Pension Fund having already joined the separate Northern Pool alongside Greater Manchester and Merseyside, Leeds was selected as the headquarters for Border to Coast because of its accessibility, talent pool and the growth of its financial services industry – which has been dubbed the ‘Northern Square Mile’ in recent years.

“Leeds has always been brilliant for financial services. In Yorkshire, we’re not always great about talking about how good we are. This is an area where we should be proud as a region of what we have done.

“I like to feel we're a founding member of the Northern Square Mile. We've got about 250 people that work for us in really meaningful roles and are maybe contributing to not having to go to London to start your career and further your career, which is something that I feel really passionate about.”