Border to Coast expands ESG voting and engagement scrutiny

August 16th, 2024

Border to Coast Pensions Partnership is advancing its monitoring of its wider external manager ESG voting and engagement to boost support for ESG resolutions.

The pension pool, which pools the investments of Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) funds and represents £52.3 billion in assets, will introduce quarterly reviews for external managers, assessing how and why they voted on a sample of materially relevant resolutions, Responsible Investor reports.

The reviews will also assess the managers’ reporting on engagement, requesting information on their total number of engagements, engagement themes, objectives, how they engaged, who they engaged, the result of the engagement, whether they were satisfied and next steps.

The pension pool said it was introducing these measures to ensure the wider voting of managers is aligned with the goals and objectives of the partnership.

Improving the support for ESG resolutions at AGMs would, in turn, improve engagement, Borders to Coast said.

Minerva Analytics’ Governance Watch supports asset owners in their stewardship and ESG responsibilities, providing a far-reaching and accessible solution for analysing their external managers’ stewardship and voting activities. The service also helps asset owners in meeting their reporting obligations under the Principles for Responsible Investment and Stewardship Code reporting requirements.

Governance Watch not only monitors governance and voting policy issues but provides timely alerts to important up-coming events as well as offering the comfort of a thorough audit of policy implementation by managers.

In addition to considering a wide range of governance factors, the service also incorporates recommendations from fundamental investor bodies, such as the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, The Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Transition Pathway Initiative.