Kent County pension fund increases allocation to PE

Sofia Karadima
27 September 2018

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Kent County Council Superannuation Fund, the £6.1bn public pension fund, increases its exposure to private equity to 4% from 1.5%, according to minutes from the investment committee held on June 22.

The committee has agreed to allocate further capital to fund-of-funds manager HarbourVest, by disinvesting from UK passive equities. The market value of the pension fund's investments with HarbourVest has grown to £70m as of June. It also has a £20m commitment to UK-based VC firm YFM Equity Partners, which is now valued at £22m.

Private equity has been the best performing asset class for the quarter to June, where the Harbourvest and YFM portfolio returned 12.80% and 3.73% respectively. The entire private equity portfolio generated 10.52% returns for the same period, beating its 0.09% benchmark.

However, the UK equity and fixed income portfolio underperformed over the same period, hurting the overall returns. The pension scheme achieved an investment return of 4.7%, down from its 4.8% strategic benchmark.

The pension scheme has recently committed to Kent Life Science Fund, and YFMEP 2016.

Kent County Council Superannuation Fund is part of Access, a group of local government pension schemes that agreed to pool their investments in a bid to achieve cost and scale benefits.