The British Business Bank’s managing director speaks to LGC about forging links with the LGPS.
Wyndham North, managing director, capital formation, at the British Business Bank, speaking at the LGC Local Investment Summit 2026
Founded in 2013, the British Business Bank says its mission is “to drive economic growth by helping smaller businesses get the finance they need to start, scale and stay in the UK”.
And increasingly, it wants to work with the Local Government Pension Scheme to achieve this.
Wyndham North, the bank’s managing director, capital formation, told LGC about the two parts of its business: “We have a banking business, which is all about supporting lending. We work with lenders to lend more. And we have an investment part of our business, which is about investing into more companies and investing via fund managers into companies”
He says that over the past eight or nine years the bank has “really developed our venture capital investing capability” and is now the largest limited partner (LP) investor in UK venture “by a substantial amount”.
He adds: “We’re also a very active direct investor, but until recently all of the money that we’ve invested has been public money. Two or three years ago we started to think: how else could we try and support institutional money to come in more actively, come in alongside us, and invest more into this part of the market?
“We see a real opportunity to bring more money in. In the US, for an average venture capital fund something in the region of 70% of its capital comes from pension funds. In the UK it’s about 10% and a lot of that is overseas.”
This led to the creation of the British Growth Partnership, which is deploying money into UK growth companies such as Wayve Technologies, a British autonomous driving technology company.
BBB has also launched Venture Link, which the bank’s website says “provides an online portal to give institutional investors direct sight of the bank’s LP investments and opportunities that the bank has backed that are open to investment”.
It adds: “We are leveraging our scale and networks to seek to help pension funds increase allocations to UK venture capital, by improving visibility of investment opportunities as pension funds look to enter the market.”
It currently lists 16 open opportunities in areas including healthcare, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and digital, and Mr North describes it as “a signal that it’s been through our diligence process, it’s been through our governance”.
A number of these funds are not restricted to solely investing in the UK, with some including investments in Europe and America.
Mr North says when BBB acts as a direct investor “it’s all been UK companies,” and “so far all of [the British Growth Partnership’s] deals have been UK”. However, he adds: “We reserve the option to do some stuff that is that is beyond, but that’s UK focused.”
And when BBB invests via venture capital managers, it “always looks for a UK impact, but we also have to be commercial about it and realistic about it”.
He adds: “That does involve them investing sometimes in Europe or elsewhere. We do also work to try and bring great managers in from the US or elsewhere into the UK as well, so that they develop more of a presence in the UK.
“We think about it from a number of different angles, and it’s not necessarily exclusively UK, but we have a certain focus on the UK.”
In July, a consortium of some of the UK’s largest pension providers – including a number of LGPS pools – announced “their commitment to explore the establishment of a first-of-its-kind vehicle dedicated to investing in scaling UK businesses”.
The proposed UK scale-up fund would be worth over £1bn and back “the next generation of high-growth British science and technology companies”.
The press release, complete with quotes from prime minister Andy Burnham and chancellor John Healey, said the “British Business Bank is working alongside the pension providers to support the launch of the fund and with the intention of investing in partnership with the group”.
Asked what sort of returns LGPS pools require, Mr North says he is “hesitant to put numbers from the discussions we have had,” but adds it is clear the investments need to achieve “a risk-adjusted financial return that makes sense for the pension funds” but can also create real benefits for the UK “in terms of economic growth, in terms of job creation, in terms of innovation”.
This interview took place at the LGC Local Investment Summit 2026. The British Business Bank was a sponsor of the event, but this interview was conducted separately to this, with the BBB having no advance sight of the questions or the article.