Richard Law-Deeks on returning to the LGPS at a defining moment

Interviewee:

Richard Law-Deeks
Chief Executive Officer
LGPS Central

Richard Law-Deeks returned to the LGPS for his “dream job”. Within months, Mansion House, Fit for the Future and the arrival of six new partner funds had placed LGPS Central at the heart of sector-wide reform

Would I be mad to go for this job?”

It’s not a question that’s typically asked in a job interview, not least when you’re looking to bag your “dream job”, but that is exactly what Richard Law-Deeks asked in his interview with Joanne Segars, the chair of LGPS Central at the time.

But it was a timely question at a time where the company had undergone a lot of recent change, and one that would lead to him becoming chief executive officer of the pool company, and returning to local government for the first time in more than a decade.

Early beginnings

From his formative years, Richard was drawn to the public sector and purpose-driven work. With both his parents working as nurses, many of his earliest memories were of spending time in hospitals, including one Christmas spent in an A&E department while both of his parents were on shift, seeing first-hand the dedication, pressure and humanity that sit at the heart of public service.

So, when coming out of university, he knew he wanted to do something purpose-driven and in the public sector. That’s when he decided to join a CIPFA Finance Graduate Programme in a local authority.

As with most graduate programmes, this involved a series of placements across the services of the county council, including adult and children’s services – but he ended up taking a full-time role in the team where his first placement had taken place, in treasury and pensions.

This gave him the chance to combine all the exciting “Gordon Gekko stuff” that came from exposure to capital markets, with the positive impact that working in the pensions sector can bring to millions of people’s lives.

He explained: “The big thing about pensions and using capital markets, specifically in the LGPS, is that scheme members generally aren’t the best paid people. These are people running libraries, these are social workers; these are key people delivering public services for their communities, often for decades, who want to retire.

“They are not getting gold-plated pensions; they’re relatively modest pensions – on average a little over £5,000 per year – a meaningful top up on their state pension. “I found that incredibly rewarding and exciting, and it combines all the best bits of capitalism with a sense of purpose, taking care of people in their retirement.”

“So I was kind of hooked.”

Another key element to his early career was his experience in both a county council and a borough council – with the two having a DNA that is “fundamentally different”, underscoring in his mind the diversity present in the LGPS.

He said: “Every fund is really different; it’s got a different history and character from the place it is based, and I think that’s really positive.

“I’ve worked in places where pension funds have lost that local connection.

“At Royal Mail, slightly before my time, there used to be lots of regional pension engagement; there used to be a bus that went around the country visiting posties, and all that got centralised because of costs.

“What’s really good about the LGPS is that you’ve still got the local funds, and there’s a real connection there to members.

“What’s really good about pooling is that it doesn’t take that away – you get the scale, you get the professionalism of having a big “mega-fund” – but you also get to retain that local connection on the admin side.”

Rise to Royal Mail

Speaking of his time at Royal Mail, this came after leaving the LGPS to work for Marsh McLennan. While at Marsh McLennan he got headhunted for a role at Royal Mail – joining at a rather interesting time, and one which had parallels with what we’re seeing in the LGPS.

“When Royal Mail privatised, the assets and liabilities went to government and they started again,” he explained. “What attracted me to Royal Mail is that it’s like the LGPS.

“These are posties, and we saw it during Covid; they’re really key people in our communities. Sometimes for vulnerable or older people, the only person they’ll see all day is the post person. While they’re trying to turn it into an Amazon and it’s all about parcels, I believe many posties are in effect similar to LGPS members.

“The company was almost quasi-public sector at that point, so there was a real sense of purpose around the pension scheme.”

Spending almost a decade at the organisation – first as its head of finance and later as its chief executive, Richard had to work through and resolve several crises – such as cyber incidents, the LDI crisis, and an industrial dispute that “nearly took the company down”.

“What I got from that was resilience,” he explained. “Like the big transition they underwent during privatisation, and it’s really helped in this role at LGPS Central, having to believe in yourself, your team and deliver what sometimes feels undeliverable.”

While at the top of the Royal Mail Fund, he also helped to lead it through an OCIO process for the main pension plan – essentially outsourcing the team and effectively transferring his people over to a third party to implement investment strategy.

He added: “We had someone else taking over management of the assets. We were also doing de-risking transactions with insurers, alongside other schemes within the group.

“Then, you’re giving your members away to someone else to administer. It was the right thing to do, but I know what that feels like – so I think it’s really helped to have a sense of empathy with our funds.

“I know what it’s like for someone to say, ‘we’re giving it to them’. Your instinct, naturally, as a human being is, ‘I can do that, I’ve done it for years’, so I completely understand where LGPS pension funds are coming from, and I think that’s really helped over the last 12 months.”

A return to purpose

In 2024, Richard decided to make the move back to the LGPS – joining LGPS Central Limited as the pool’s new chief executive officer.

Reflecting on this decision, he said: “I knew it wasn’t going to be quiet, but I did not expect the government to go as hard as they did.”

Richard had been following the pool for quite a while, and when he knew there was a chief executive vacancy at LGPS Central, he knew he wanted to go for it.

“This is my dream job”, he explained. “It’s in the West Midlands, which is where I’m from; it’s back in the LGPS, which is an open scheme with great people whom I knew and where I had built friendships right back at the start – some were literally the same people – it was really exciting.”

From the outside, though, a move to the pool wasn’t an obvious one as – despite it being set up in all the right ways – it had experienced some bumps in the road in a way that some other pools, the likes of Border to Coast or LPPI, had not. Richard added: “When I came looking for them, I think it shocked them a little bit.”

After going through the traditional chat with the external recruiter, he sat down with the chair at the time, Joanne Segars, and asked one very simple question: “Would I be mad to take this job?”

He added: “I had a very open conversation about the pool. The other thing is, I’d worked out that she was coming to the end of her tenure, and for a chief executive that’s really risky, because any new chair who comes in might want to make changes.

“So I knew I’d have to come in and do a lot of work to prove myself not just once but maybe twice.” Despite this anxiety, Richard has been able to establish a solid working partnership with the new chair, Nemone Wynn-Evans.

To get a full handle on what he was letting himself in for, he spoke to individuals across the length and breadth of the LGPS to try and work out what the problems were that needed to be fixed.

He also spoke to stakeholders and suppliers to understand what was going on. He added: “Then when I arrived, it was about listening – that was all I did for the first month.

“I listened to the partner funds; I didn’t try and defend anything that might have happened in the past. I just took it all in.

“I went and saw people in-person. I travelled from Cheshire to Nottingham to Worcestershire – I went and saw everyone, met everyone, met the s151 officers, the Pension Committee chairs and the pension fund officers, it took up a lot of time – but it was time well spent.”

Building the 2030 strategy

This period, he added, built up a lot of trust with the partner funds. This work led to his first big success in the role: being able to get unanimous support for a budget and strategic business plan he put together.

“But it was still only looking a year ahead,” he added. “What I’m really pleased about is, a year on, we’ve now put together something that takes us to 2030, which is much more long-term.”

To build this strategy, and to ensure that all the funds across the pool were “bought into it”, the pool called a summit for all of its partners to redefine the purpose of the pool and work out how they were all going to work together – writing out all the ideas on whiteboards.

Richard added: “It’s semantics, but it’s really important because you want everyone to own those words.”

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

With the strategy signed off, Richard’s focus shifted to culture – something he describes as “absolutely key” to the pool’s next phase.

“What’s the thing people say? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. We’ve got a strategy; we now need to build the culture. We need to retain the stuff that’s really good,” he explained.

“I really like the fact that we’ve got LGPS in the name of our company. People say, ‘why have you got that?’ but it reminds everyone what we’re here to do.

“There’s some really good stuff that we’ve got around our history, and the fact that we’ve got a team where everyone gets stuck in, everyone works together really positively. But there’s some things we need to change.”

A key part of that, he added, is being deliberate about what not to import from elsewhere in the industry.

“We want to take the best of what you might get from a commercial asset manager – but leave behind the stuff that’s not healthy. There is stuff out there that I’ve seen in other organisations that I would only describe as a kind of toxic culture that we just don’t want. Retaining that sense of purpose is really important.”

Fit for the Future and Mansion House

Richard’s arrival at LGPS Central came on the eve of a new government, and a new era of pensions reform. This, of course, culminated in the newly appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing the Fit for the Future consultation in her Mansion House Speech in November 2024.

“We had been given a bit of a head start”, Richard explained: “We’d done a lot of engaging, we’d been invited to various meetings, and we were given 24 hours’ notice before the Mansion House announcement.

“The first thing I did was call all my partner funds and make sure they knew what was coming, because I was actually quite worried about how people would feel.”

As part of the Mansion House reforms, each pool had to put forward plans as to how they planned to manage under the new rules. LGPS Central wrote its plan “by committee”.

Richard added: “Have you ever written something by committee? It’s horrendous. We couldn’t agree on words, but we had to go through it, and everyone had to agree on what we were going to try to achieve and what we weren’t.

“Being realistic was really important, but we did get a plan together.”

While LGPS Central received approval from MHCLG to go forward with its plan – others weren’t so lucky, with the shock news that – despite what had appeared at the time to be positive discussions with the minister – ACCESS and Brunel didn’t get their plans through.

This of course left 21 pension funds without a home. And – instigated by the pool’s partner funds – LGPS Central collectively decided to offer itself as a landing ground for the orphaned funds.

Richard explained: “It was fully driven by that paternal thing that the LGPS has – we do try and look after each other.

“There’s a little bit of competition from some of the funds but they always try to support each other.”

The pitch to the orphaned funds

As for how these conversations first arose, it started off rather informally – with people, in essence, asking if the pool was open to new members. This became more formal over time, and questionnaires began to come in.

There was also a sense that funds were looking for different things from their new pool – some wanted something that was finished, and others wanted to help shape the pool that they were joining. LGPS Central sits in the latter of these camps, with new funds helping to set the strategy and governance.

This opportunity comes partly from the fact that the pool decided to “rethink everything and start again”. Richard explained: “We haven’t made it easy getting to the 1st of April.

“We tore up our old legal documents; we had a governance review – we redrafted everything. We didn’t make it easy for ourselves, but it was the right thing to do.”

Wiltshire was the first to declare its preferred destination – with its decision to join Central “really encouraging”.

Richard added: “For the first fund to declare where they’re going, and for them to declare they were coming to Central, it was a huge boost for us. I went down there, presented to their Pensions Committee, and it felt a real positive for the company.”

Formal legal agreements were put in place for Wiltshire and a further five partner funds to join the pool, with the Isle of Wight – which had some issues to resolve with its wider council – a bit further behind than the others.

And, while Central got everything it needed to get online and in place by 1st April, as Richard pointed out, there’s “a lot of stuff still to do”.

He added: “There’s a phased period where different services will start.

“And while the expectation is that we’ll do the implementation of the investment strategy, we’re being very cautious about when we switch things off and on.

“And that’s partly based on my experience at Royal Mail.

“I’ve seen it throughout my career, so we’re being really pragmatic about how we move things from the existing setup with the funds to us. And I think everyone is on the same page on that.”

Local investment

Beyond the mechanics of onboarding new funds, the bigger question is what all this scale is actually for – and here the Fit for the Future reforms are unambiguous.

One absolute key pillar of the Fit for the Future reforms is a push towards more local investment, with a particular focus on pools working closer with combined authorities. Richard believes that, if the sector can get this to work, it could have a transformative effect on the country’s ability to unlock regional investments.

He added: “There’s a whole load of local projects that do not happen because of viability – combined authorities have resources and powers to be able to fix that.

“The other thing is planning. So, in the new world, post-LGR, the administering authorities will be able potentially to support on that.”

Of course, this close collaboration between the LGPS and administering authorities is not a new idea, with this work being pioneered in Greater Manchester. A significant driver of this work was Paddy Dowdall – who’s joined the team at LGPS Central.

Having said this, given different regional needs, the type of investments taking place in these areas will vary from place to place. And LGPS Central, like many of the other pools, runs the gamut of this regional diversity.

It has the West Midlands – which, as of 1st April, has the same powers as Greater Manchester.

But it also has the East Midlands Combined County Authority, which is made up of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and has only been established relatively recently. Compared to Greater Manchester, it has a much more rural population and is very different to metropolitan areas.

Richard added: “Within local investment, for the pools, there’s going to be some that look more like the things you see coming out of Greater Manchester, but there might be another end of the spectrum that looks more like a pool fund that invests across the region on a pooled basis.”

Two years into the role, Richard’s tenure at LGPS Central has coincided with one of the most significant periods of change in the pool’s history. Between Mansion House, Fit for the Future and the arrival of six new partner funds, the pool has had to redefine itself at pace – while still keeping the local connections that drew him back to the LGPS in the first place.

What’s striking, though, is how much of his approach traces back to those early lessons: the empathy of a finance grad who saw pensions as a public service, and the resilience of a Royal Mail chief executive who learned to deliver the seemingly undeliverable.

Both have shaped a leadership style built on listening first, being transparent about trade-offs, and trusting partner funds to own the decisions that affect them.

The road to 2030 won’t be without its bumps – local investment, advisory conflicts and the mechanics of onboarding new funds will all test the pool in different ways.

But if Richard’s first two years are anything to go by, LGPS Central looks well-placed to navigate them with the same steady, partner-led approach that’s defined his time there so far.