Our Fund has assets worth billions of pounds, which the Trustee uses to pay members that benefits as they fall due.

The Trustee has a formal strategy for investing these assets.

The strategy has two high level objectives.

The cost of providing members benefit is impacted by changes in inflation and interest rates.

Our first priority is to reduce this risk.

We achieve this by investing in Government bonds, also referred to as gilts, and other similar types of lower risk investments.

We also want the assets to grow. This will help the Fund get to a fully funded position on a very low risk basis.

To do this we also invest in assets that are likely to provide greater returns, such as equities, property and infrastructure funds.

Our strategy seeks to get the right balance between the safer stable investments, such as gilts, and the more volatile return generating ones.

Overtime as we get closer to our funding target we want to have more on the safe side of the scales as the need to generate additional investment returns diminishes.

We talk about our funding position and how we measure this in the video ‘Managing the Funding’.

You can find more detailed information about our investment strategy in the Statement of Investment Principles document, which you can view and download from the Library section of the Fund website.

Thank you for watching.