Local Pensions Partnership (LPP) is a UK Local Government Pension Scheme pool, formed in 2016 by Lancashire County Council and the London Pensions Fund Authority. Through its FCA-regulated arm, LPP Investments, it manages roughly £26.5 billion for partner funds and provides administration for more than 600,000 members, pooling assets to cut costs and scale into infrastructure.
What is Local Pensions Partnership?
Local Pensions Partnership (LPP) is one of the asset pools at the centre of a quiet revolution in how UK public pension money is managed. It was formed in 2016 as a joint venture between Lancashire County Council and the London Pensions Fund Authority — two large Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) funds that decided to combine their investment and administration operations rather than continue to run them separately.
The logic was straightforward. The LGPS is not a single national fund but a patchwork of dozens of local funds, each historically buying its own investment management, paying its own fees and running its own administration. That fragmentation was expensive and left individual funds too small to access certain assets — large-scale infrastructure in particular — on competitive terms. LPP was an early answer to that problem: pool the assets, share the back office, and use the combined scale to invest better and more cheaply.
How does LPP work, and how large is it?
LPP operates through two main strands. Its investment arm, LPP Investments (LPPI), is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and runs the pooled portfolios on behalf of partner funds. Its administration business provides pension services — calculating benefits, handling member queries, paying pensioners — for a wide group of public-sector schemes.
The numbers convey the scale. LPPI manages roughly £26.5 billion across its partner funds as of 2025, a figure that includes capital committed to its GLIL Infrastructure platform. On the administration side, LPP serves more than 600,000 members of LGPS, police and firefighters' pension schemes across more than 1,900 employers. Since launch the partnership has reported substantial cumulative savings for its client funds, the core promise of the pooling model made tangible.
What is the LGPS, and why is it being pooled?
To understand LPP you have to understand the system it belongs to. The Local Government Pension Scheme is the funded pension arrangement for local government and many related public-sector workers in England, Wales and Scotland. Unlike most UK public-sector pensions, which are unfunded and paid from current taxation, the LGPS actually holds invested assets — collectively one of the largest pools of pension capital in Europe.
Since 2015, successive UK governments have pressed LGPS funds to consolidate their investments into a small number of larger pools. The motivations are consistent across administrations: cut investment costs through scale, strengthen governance, and channel more capital into productive assets such as infrastructure and UK growth investment. LPP, alongside peers like Border to Coast and LGPS Central, was created as one of the vehicles to deliver that vision.
What is GLIL Infrastructure?
One of LPP's most distinctive features is GLIL Infrastructure, a collaborative platform that lets participating LGPS funds invest directly in core infrastructure — energy, transport, utilities and similar long-life assets — rather than paying the fees and accepting the terms of traditional external infrastructure funds. Direct and co-investment of this kind is exactly the sort of activity that small individual funds cannot easily do alone but that pooled scale makes possible.
GLIL is a concrete illustration of why pooling matters beyond cost savings. It is not just cheaper access to the same assets; it is access to a different, better way of investing — the kind of direct, control-oriented infrastructure investing long associated with the large Canadian pension plans. For UK local government money, GLIL is a step toward that model.
How are the UK 'megafund' reforms reshaping LPP?
The pooling story is now entering a more dramatic phase. Under the government's "Fit for the Future" agenda, the ambition has shifted from encouraging pooling to mandating consolidation into a handful of much larger "megafunds," each managing tens of billions of pounds. This is actively redrawing the map.
The practical effect is rapid growth and reallocation across the surviving pools. LPP is expected to take on a large tranche of additional assets — including from the Brunel Pension Partnership, which is being wound down — while peers such as Border to Coast and LGPS Central are likewise swelling as funds choose new homes. For LPP, the reforms are simultaneously an opportunity (more scale, more bargaining power) and a challenge (integrating new partner funds and assets at speed while maintaining performance and service).
The ownable insight: pooling is about capability, not just cost
It is easy to frame LGPS pooling purely as a cost-cutting exercise — fewer managers, lower fees, better buying power. That is real, and LPP's reported savings are evidence of it. But the more important shift is about capability. The reason scale matters is that it changes what kinds of investing become possible: direct infrastructure through GLIL, in-house management of more of the portfolio, and the negotiating leverage to set terms rather than accept them.
The clearest tell for whether the UK's megafund experiment is working will not be the headline fee number. It will be whether pools like LPP genuinely build the in-house, direct-investment capability that has made the large Canadian and Australian funds so effective — or whether consolidation simply produces bigger buyers of the same external products. LPP, with GLIL already in place, is one of the pools best positioned to land on the right side of that distinction.
What does LPP mean for the wider market?
For the UK, LPP is a live test of whether pooling can turn fragmented local pension capital into a sophisticated, low-cost, infrastructure-capable investor on the Canadian model. For global managers and asset owners, the consolidation of the LGPS into a few megafunds is significant in its own right: it concentrates a very large pool of capital into fewer, more professional decision-making bodies, changing who the relevant counterparties are for UK infrastructure and private-market deals.
LPP will not rival a sovereign wealth fund in size. But as one of the building blocks of a reshaped LGPS, it sits at the heart of one of the most consequential public-pension reforms underway in any major economy.