Voting Activity

As a global investor, Merseyside Pension Fund wishes to promote the highest standards of corporate governance in all the companies and markets in which it invests. We believe these standards are most clearly encapsulated in the UK Combined Code of Corporate Governance.

However, we do not regard these standards to be necessarily static and believe, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis, that they should adapt to reflect the wider values of civil society.

PIRC Ltd is the Fund’s corporate governance adviser and provides research, analysis and voting recommendations that cover all holdings in the UK and overseas equity portfolios. The Fund has adopted as its voting policy the PIRC Global Shareholder Voting Guidelines and, as of July 2008, responsibility for executing the voting was transferred to PIRC.

We believe that voting rights are an intrinsic part of the value of share ownership, and our voting policy forms the primary mechanism by which the Fund exercises its ownership interest in its investee companies. We also believe in the value of disclosing our voting record.

Part of the Fund’s allocation to UK equities is managed in pooled funds, where the Fund is a unit-holder but not the legal owner of the underlying shares. However, our voting policy is adapted to this, and the Legal & General UK Equity Index Fund is mandated to vote on our portion of the underlying shares, according to the voting recommendations received from PIRC.