People's Partnership

People's Partnership

People's Partnership operates as a not-for-profit financial services business from Crawley, West Sussex, delivering workplace pensions to over 7 million savers and 100,000 employers under The People's Pension master trust. Unlike a commercial insurer, it has no shareholders to satisfy; all profits fold back into member benefits and responsible investment capabilities. The firm's reach covers the full UK employment base, from large corporates down to micro-employers managing auto-enrolment duties. The master trust portfolio spans investment-grade credit, listed equities, real assets, and an expanding allocation to private markets designed to improve risk-adjusted outcomes for members over a 30-to-40-year horizon. In 2024 the manager became a signatory to the UK's Mansion House Compact, committing to allocate at least 5% of default-fund assets to unlisted equities by 2030. The internal investment team runs a blended public-private model, using external managers for specialist mandates such as direct infrastructure, commercial real estate, and sustainable-fixed-income strategies, while co-investing alongside large global GPs in buyout and growth opportunities. The geographic core remains the UK across all mandates, with some exposure to developed Europe and North America within the private-markets sleeve. The organisation reports a total asset base around £26 billion as of early 2024 (roughly $33 billion at prevailing exchange rates), making it one of the ten largest UK master trusts by size. Headcount exceeds 850 staff. A broader group-level entity, People's Partnership Limited, holds several regulated subsidiaries and a charitable arm, the Construction Workers' Charitable Trust, which originated in the firm's building-industry roots. In September 2023, chief executive Patrick Heath-Lay announced a fixed-term rebate that returned £60 million to members as a cost-of-living support measure, underscoring the firm's profit-to-member constitution (per the firm, September 2023). Structurally, People's Partnership is both a pension provider and an active industry consolidator. It belongs to the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, the Association of British Insurers, and the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, and it is a United Nations PRI signatory, leveraging those memberships to drive policy reform on auto-enrolment adequacy and small-pot consolidation. Under Heath-Lay, the office has evolved from the building-trade pension scheme it once was into a nationally scaled fiduciary that competes directly with shareholder-owned rivals on cost and governance while maintaining a distinct social-purpose charter.