Agenda item

The Board received a presentation from Sara Llewellyn Chief Executive of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, after which Members of the Board had the opportunity to ask questions.

Ms Llewellyn gave an overview of the history of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, which was a family Trust, driven by Quaker values, and was one in the vanguard of the social investment movement. The Barrow Cadbury Trust has an endowment of £85m and holds a variety of social, responsible and ethical investments. It has designated £4m for social investment activities aligned with its charitable mission. Ms Llewellyn discussed the difficulties in negotiating risk in the social investment market. A large part of this depended on how risk-averse the investor was; what the market arguably needed was not what organisations were generally prepared to provide. Opportunities with the lowest risk, however, were bankable, resulting in companies looking to commercial lenders rather than organisations like the Barrow Cadbury Trust. This leads to a slow pipeline of potential investments, a problem which had been observed by this Board. 

The Board discussed risk compared with the differing priorities of the Barrow Cadbury Trust and the Social Investment Board, and, in response to a question regarding the potential trade-off between financial return and social impact, Ms Llewellyn advised that capital preservation did not necessarily result in such a trade-off. This could potentially be addressed through blended finance (the complementary use of grants and non-grant financing) to provide financing for high risk investments with a large social impact, on terms that would make projects financially viable and/or sustainable. Ms Llewellyn also advised that a varied portfolio could mitigate such a trade-off, balancing losses on higher-risk investments with gains on lower-risk ones so that the value of social impact investments are judged across the portfolio.

The Chairman thanked Ms Llewellyn for her presentation.