Bruntwood SciTech, the UK’s leading specialist property provider, founded by Legal & General and Bruntwood in 2018 to support the growth of the life science and tech sectors, has secured £500 million of additional investment and welcomed the UK’s largest local authority pension fund, Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), to the partnership.
GMPF is the first local government pension scheme to make a direct and active investment into a UK-wide science, tech and innovation specialist property platform. The deal demonstrates the role that such funds can play in regenerating the UK’s towns and cities; helping to create highly-skilled jobs, increase productivity and drive wage growth, while supporting the UK’s target to become a global science and technology superpower by 2030.
Now the largest dedicated property platform serving the UK’s innovation economy, Bruntwood SciTech aims to create a £5 billion UK-wide portfolio that can support 2,600 high-growth businesses by 2032. The £500 million of new equity sees GMPF inject £150 million, alongside a significant increase in investment from existing shareholders, Legal & General and Bruntwood, through cash and asset transfer.
The new capital will be used to expand and redevelop existing science and technology campuses and city centre innovation hubs, delivering much-needed additional world-leading lab and office space in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow and Cambridge, across a secured 3.6m sq ft development pipeline. The investment will also enable Bruntwood SciTech to enter additional R&D intensive regional cities.
Critically, Bruntwood SciTech provides the connective tissue between world-leading research universities, large hospital NHS Trusts, strong civic regional leadership, and high-growth enterprise. Already, it has more than £1.5bn in assets across nine campus locations and 31 city centre innovation hubs, offering 4.8m sq ft of world-class specialist workspace, support, and like-minded communities for 1,100 high-growth start-ups, scale ups, and global businesses.
Over the last five years, Bruntwood SciTech, which began with a portfolio of 1.3m sq ft, has proven its ability to create places that nurture and grow innovation-based businesses, especially those working within the life science and tech sectors. Several developments are already underway that will support the growth of city-wide like-minded ecosystems for A.I, medtech, diagnostics, genomics, fintech, edtech and digital health businesses. This includes Citylabs 4.0 in Manchester - a health innovation and precision medicine hub, Birmingham’s first truly smart building Enterprise Wharf, and a new dedicated digital and tech hub at Glasgow’s Met Tower.
With the UK still behind some of its global competitors in providing the necessary volume of specialist infrastructure for the science and technology sector to scale, offer more highly-skilled jobs, and contribute an even greater economic return, Bruntwood SciTech has a clear focus on providing the UK’s regional cities with the capacity they need to support future growth.
Through its new structure, Bruntwood SciTech has enabled other UK local authority pension funds to co-invest efficiently and on an asset by asset basis, so that long term, patient capital can play a crucial role in the growth of the domestic innovation sector. Discussions are already underway with a number of other major local authority-linked funds for additional capital investment.