What is the National Wealth Fund for? As the strategy leads for the organisation, our starting point is that we are here to increase investment across the UK to accelerate delivery of the Government’s growth and clean energy missions.

To do this effectively, we need to be a bridge. We connect government, private finance and the public, who ultimately benefit from our investments and who rely on us to find the right balance between taking risk on their behalf and providing them with a return.

We also need to be a trusted partner. Ultimately, it is the public that entrust us with their money – through the Government – to make investments on their behalf to deliver growth and the clean energy transition, leading to opportunity, prosperity and a sustainable, greener future for communities nationwide.

And our partners – developers, co-investors and government departments - trust us to be a professional, resourceful and creative collaborator that can bring a deep understanding of finance to seek out and unblock problems, alongside the insight to ensure our investments support and anchor the policy priorities of the Government.

Today we are publishing a document – Financing the Future - that sets out more detail about how we see and approach this role at this stage in our development, and starts to map out the road ahead as we build towards a longer-term strategic plan.

We are doing this now because we have received additional capital – a further £5.8bn - and the Chancellor’s Statement of Strategic Priorities, which gives us a new mandate, new regional focus, new products and increased risk capacity to address market weaknesses and investment barriers. 

So, Financing the Future is the first staging post in developing our strategy – it’s not the final answer, we will be testing our thinking with others in the coming weeks to get to that. It does, however, provide clarity on our approach to delivering our mission, our investment offer and how we are working with the market and the Government to set our strategy. 

That expanded mandate allows us to play a broader role, supporting the sectors the Government has identified to drive economic growth and the clean energy transition. We organise around these sectors, with deep commercial expertise and dedicated teams, responsible for proactively engaging the market and building relationships to deliver transactions that mobilise private capital, support job creation and contribute to our carbon abatement targets.

Our ambition is to achieve a step change in our commitments. Financing the Future outlines how we can deploy capital at scale and use our commercial expertise to support government policy to go further and faster, including: 

  • Backing strategic projects: supporting the largest and most strategically important domestic projects for the UK’s growth and clean energy missions, where there is an undersupply of private finance.
  • Scaling nascent markets and earlier stage technologies: investing in first-of-a-kind technologies or cornerstoning projects involving novel business models, supporting the Government’s priorities, to enable the next generation of companies to scale-up their operations in the UK.
  • Ensuring supply chain resilience: in an increasingly unpredictable global trading environment, increasing the UK’s economic security and resilience requires investments to onshore or diversify critical supply chains. We can act across the breadth of supply chains: from scaling UK manufacturing to the critical minerals vital to the UK’s clean energy transition.
  • Investing in places: We want to help places thrive, directly supporting local leaders to achieve their local growth plans. We are trialling a new way of working in partnership with local and regional leaders through our four Strategic Partnerships. This will include providing early-stage project development to help local leaders in these places identify and develop viable projects and build investable pipelines. 

We won’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to deals and our specific role will vary by sub-sector, calibrated to market needs and the Government’s priorities.

We will only act where we believe doing so will crowd in private finance over time, being vigilant about treading on others’ toes. We will also work in partnership with our fellow public finance institutions, such as the British Business Bank and Great British Energy, with the confidence to hand over potential transactions if other parts of the ecosystem are a better fit for their financing needs.

So, our call to the market is to work with us as we accelerate the UK’s growth and clean energy missions and, to this end, we want to hear from anyone that has a project they would like to explore, noting that our minimum ticket size is £25 million for private investments and £5 million for local authority lending – please use our contact form for this. 

Financing the Future is in part a prospectus. But, above all, it is a statement of future intent, to provide all the clarity and direction we can at this stage around how we will discharge that dual role as a bridge and a trusted partner, under an expanded mandate, driving growth and the clean energy transition for the benefit of everyone.

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