Wandsworth’s pension fund paid one investment manager £2.15m last year to lose 12.6 per cent of the money it managed, in a year when the stock market it was chasing rose 16.8 per cent.
The manager is Longview, which runs a concentrated fund of global shares for the borough’s £3.3bn pension pot. What makes the loss sting is that a cheaper alternative sat in the very same portfolio and did the opposite: Legal & General’s index tracker, which follows the market instead of trying to beat it, returned 17.4 per cent over the same year while charging only a fraction of Longview’s fee.
That is a gap of 30 percentage points between the fund Wandsworth paid handsomely and the one it barely paid at all. Longview held around £535m of pension money through the year, and 30 percentage points on £535m works out at roughly £160m: the difference, in a single year, between hiring someone to beat the market and simply following it. The exact figure shifts with the timing of the money but every number behind it is the fund’s own.
A hidden cost to taxpayers
None of this puts anyone’s pension at risk. Because the scheme pays a guaranteed, defined benefit, the teachers, care workers and council staff who pay into it will receive exactly what they were promised whatever the investments do. The cost of underperformance falls instead on the employers who top the fund up, which means Wandsworth Council, Richmond Council and the 50 or so schools and academies across the two boroughs, all drawing on the same budgets that pay for teaching and local services.
The reckoning is deferred rather than avoided. Because the fund is currently in surplus, 121 per cent funded, employers’ contribution rates were actually cut in April, with the main rate falling from 20 per cent of pay to 15.8 per cent, and those rates now hold until the next three-yearly valuation in 2028. It is that valuation, not this year’s report, that will turn any lasting underperformance into higher bills for schools and the council and, after a few years, to taxpayers.
Governors who want to know where their own school stands can ask the pensions team for its rate now, and scheme members can read the full report and check their own position through the same office (pensions@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk).
Three meetings, no exit
None of this crept up unseen. Putney.news has been tracking the fund’s underperformance since 2025, and Longview’s holding has sat above the 15 per cent ceiling the committee sets for any single active manager since October 2024. Yet at meeting after meeting the response barely moved: the Joint Pensions Committee noted the breach that October, considered shifting money into passive funds and reviewed the overweight position in December 2025, and in March 2026 finally agreed to sell part of the holding, though to fund a new government-bond allocation rather than as any answer to the performance. That pattern of noting and reviewing without acting is one we reported in March.
The push to act did not come from the councillors. At that same March meeting the fund’s own pool operator effectively told them to get out: Jenny Buck, chief investment officer at London CIV, said she was “incredibly disappointed” with the concentrated fund, which holds only around 25 stocks, and advised the committee to dilute its exposure. The partial sale was carried out in April, by which point Longview had just closed its worst quarter on record, falling 13.6 per cent while the market slipped only 1.6 per cent, as we reported in June.
The power to switch is gone
By then, in any case, the decision was slipping out of Wandsworth’s hands. The Pension Schemes Act 2026, in force since April, requires the fund to invest through the London CIV pool and strips it of the power to pull money from a failing manager on its own. Its annual report sets the loss out plainly, recording that the Act “removes the Fund’s option to invest outside the CIV for any reason” and leaves it “reliant on the CIV to take any actions relating to sub-fund managers poor performance.”
For all that it holds, the fund returned 6.1 per cent over the year against a local authority average of 9.7 per cent, and when its annual report reaches the Local Pension Board for scrutiny on Thursday, members will find the fund has already chosen the word for its own performance: “disappointing.”
