Fifth in a series breaking down real prompts our members run on Ora, and why the wording matters as much as the data underneath it.
If you are raising for infrastructure in the UK, the Local Government Pension Scheme is the first place anyone will point you. The logic is hard to argue with: it is one of the largest pools of pension capital in Europe, the government is actively pushing it toward infrastructure and domestic productive assets, and the whole architecture of pooling was justified partly on the grounds that scale would let these funds become serious infrastructure investors.
The complication is that the thing you are being pointed at has been rebuilt in the last eighteen months, and most target lists in circulation describe a structure that no longer exists. There were eight pools. There are now six. One has been disbanded outright, another wound down with its partner funds redistributed, and the survivors are mid-transition with assets still moving between them.
The prompt below is a good screen aimed at a moving target. It also contains one category error that will produce a subtly wrong list even if every figure in it is accurate.
The prompt
I’m raising capital from UK institutional investors for an infrastructure strategy. Identify the LGPS asset pools (pooled vehicles managing multiple local authority pension funds) with infrastructure allocation targets, showing total pooled AUM, current infrastructure allocation vs. target, the pool’s infrastructure investment lead, and any recent manager selection or procurement activity.
Anatomy: what each constraint is doing
“UK institutional investors … for an infrastructure strategy.” Front-loaded context that narrows fast, and it is worth being deliberate about the narrowing. LGPS is the obvious channel but not the only one — DC master trusts, the larger corporate DB schemes, and the sovereign-adjacent vehicles all sit adjacent to this list with different governance and different timelines. Narrowing to LGPS in line one is a reasonable choice for a focused quarter of outreach. Just make it a choice rather than a default.
“LGPS asset pools (pooled vehicles managing multiple local authority pension funds).” The parenthetical is carrying the load, because it excludes the 86 individual administering authorities and points the list at the six pools. Under full delegation that is now the right unit of analysis for manager selection. But note the exception the government wrote into the final rules: funds may participate in more than one pool where they are accessing strategies unavailable in their main pool, and cross-pool collaborations were specifically acknowledged. In infrastructure, that exception is not an edge case — see below.
“With infrastructure allocation targets.” As written, an almost-universal screen that filters out very little. Rebuilt as an implementation gap against partner fund targets, it becomes the sharpest field on the list.
“Total pooled AUM.” Fine as context, but understand that it is a moving number. Pools are still onboarding partner funds and transitioning assets from previous arrangements, and several have said explicitly that they are sequencing transitions to avoid moving assets twice. A figure from six months ago may be materially wrong, and the direction of travel matters more than the level.
“Current infrastructure allocation vs. target.” The gap is your opportunity size. Read it alongside one question the prompt does not ask: whether the pool intends to close that gap through external managers at all.
“The pool’s infrastructure investment lead.” Ask for the seat, but know that infrastructure at these organisations is frequently split — direct investment sits with one team, fund and co-investment exposure with another, and real estate is sometimes bundled with infrastructure under a single director. There is also a new seat appearing across the pools: a dedicated local investment director, created specifically to deliver the local investment mandate. For an infrastructure manager with UK origination capability, that is often the more relevant door and it is too new to appear in most contact databases.
“Any recent manager selection or procurement activity.” The strongest field in the prompt, and the one where the UK gives you far more than other markets. Public-sector procurement means published tender notices; local government transparency rules mean committee agendas, minutes, and officer reports are published as a matter of course. Between tender portals and committee papers you can often reconstruct a selection process, including the shortlist and the evaluation criteria, before the appointment is announced.
The thing this prompt will teach you that nobody says out loud
The stated policy objective of the reforms you are fundraising into is to use fewer external managers.
The government’s model is explicitly the Canadian one, and the consultation set out the expectation that pools develop in-house investment management capability over time, turning to third parties where delivering a mandate internally would be inefficient. Read plainly, the direction of travel is that pools build capability and internalise implementation, and external managers fill what is left.
Infrastructure is the asset class where this has gone furthest. GLIL — the cross-pool infrastructure vehicle backed by funds in the Local Pensions Partnership and Northern pools — is now a direct investor of real scale, and its recent activity looks like a GP’s rather than an LP’s: a majority position in a Slough data centre site operated by Yondr, and a partnership with Antin on the wellboat operator Sølvtrans. Government specifically named cross-pool collaborations of this kind when confirming that multi-pool participation remains acceptable. In other words, the structure through which LGPS money most naturally reaches infrastructure is a vehicle the pools own, staffed by people who do their own deals.
This does not close the channel. It changes what you have to be. The pools are not going to build every capability, and the consultation says so. Where you win is where in-house delivery is genuinely inefficient for them: a geography they have no presence in, a sector requiring specialist technical diligence, an origination network they cannot replicate, or a scale of deal below what a direct team can economically pursue. Where you lose is pitching core UK infrastructure to a pool that has a direct team and a co-investment vehicle already pointed at it.
Screen for it explicitly. Add “and whether the pool invests in infrastructure through external funds, direct investment, cross-pool vehicles, or a combination” and you will separate the list into buyers and builders in a single field.
The timing hook: local investment strategies land now
Every partner fund was required to have a finalised local investment strategy in place by September 2026. That deadline is landing as you read this.
Two things follow that are unusually favourable. First, a large number of newly formalised strategies are arriving with stated targets and, in many cases, no developed pipeline behind them — the strategies were written to a policy deadline, and origination has to catch up. Second, the government clarified that it does not expect pools or funds to be directly involved in designing local investment projects, with local opportunities to be identified in partnership with combined authorities and regional mayors. A pool that must deploy against a local target, is not expected to originate projects itself, and has a direct team built for large-ticket national assets has a structural gap between its mandate and its capability.
That gap is the opening, and it is time-limited. Add “and any local investment strategy published since mid-2026, with stated target allocation and geography” to the prompt. It is the single highest-value addition available right now.
What you do with the list
- Build it two layers deep. Pool as the buyer, partner funds as the source of the target. A pool-only list tells you who to call; it does not tell you what they have to buy.
- Read the committee papers. Pension committee agendas and officer reports disclose allocations, targets, manager rosters, and uncalled commitments as a matter of routine. This is the best free primary source in institutional fundraising and it is systematically underused.
- Screen for transition status. The six pools have until 30 September 2027 to meet FCA requirements as full-scope UK alternative investment fund managers, and several are still onboarding partner funds inherited from the disbanded and wound-down pools. A pool mid-integration is a slow counterparty regardless of appetite, and its investment team’s bandwidth is going somewhere other than your fund.
- Check cross-pool exposure before you pitch. If a pool’s infrastructure route runs primarily through a shared vehicle, that vehicle — not the pool — may be your actual counterparty, and the conversation is a partnership or co-investment discussion rather than a fund commitment.
- Establish the procurement route early. Whether an appointment runs through a framework, an open tender, or direct selection under the pool’s own process determines your timeline and sometimes your eligibility. Ask before you invest in the relationship.
Variants worth running
- Add “and flag which pools are still completing FCA authorisation ahead of the September 2027 deadline” to sort fast counterparties from slow ones.
- Swap the pools for combined authorities and mayoral investment vehicles, the counterparties on the other side of the local investment mandate, most of whom no infrastructure manager is calling.
- Swap England and Wales for the Scottish LGPS funds, which sit outside the pooling reforms entirely and retain fund-level manager selection.
- Swap infrastructure for affordable and rental housing, natural capital, or private credit, where local investment strategies are creating targets faster than pipeline.
- Swap LGPS for DC master trusts and Mansion House signatories, a channel with its own private markets commitments and completely different governance.
- Add “and identify the investment consultant or adviser to each pool and its largest partner funds” to build the gatekeeper layer, which remains influential even under full delegation.
Why this is a prompt and not a database query
No investor database currently describes this market correctly, because the market was reorganised faster than databases update. Pools have merged, disbanded, and inherited partner funds; assets are mid-transfer; allocation figures are stale by construction; and the field that matters most — whether a pool intends to meet its infrastructure gap internally, through a shared vehicle, or with external managers — is not a field anywhere. It is an inference drawn from consultation responses, committee papers, tender notices, pool annual reports, and the deal announcements of a cross-pool vehicle that most datasets do not classify as an LGPS entity at all.
Ora reasons across those sources and shows its reasoning, so you can check an allocation figure against the committee paper it came from before you build a campaign on it.
This is the fifth post in Prompt Anatomy, where we take a real prompt run on Ora and break down why it is written the way it is. Have one you want dissected? Send it to support@octum.ai.
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