Pensioenfonds Huisartsen, the €10bn professional pension fund for Dutch general practitioners (GP), will sell its remaining fossil fuel holdings. The decision comes after an overwhelming majority of the fund’s members’ council voted in favour of divestment.
“Our members’ council has expressed a very explicit wish to divest from fossil fuels,” commented Nienke Kuppens, an ESG strategist at the GP fund.
The members’ council is made up of 28 active, former and retired GPs who have been elected by the pension fund’s 25,000 members. Pensioenfonds Huisartsen is the only Dutch pension fund with such a council.
In a vote last month, 18 members voted in favour of divestment from fossil fuels, with just three votes against. GPs have been campaigning for their pension fund to divest from fossil fuels since 2021, when GP Tibor Poelmann launched a petition on a closed forum for GPs which quickly gathered 1,200 signatures.
Though the GP fund since gradually reduced its fossil fuel exposure from €200m to €100m in 2023, it refused to divest completely from the category, arguing that not all members would support such a move.
Poelmann then initiated the launch of a sustainability commission as part of the fund’s members’ council to give non-binding advice to the pension fund’s board.
After the council voted for fossil fuel divestment, the fund’s board “evaluated this request,” said Pieter de Graaf, head of investments at Pensioenfonds Huisartsen.
No impact on returns
“We concluded that we could follow this principled wish of the members without this affecting the expected return of the investments,” De Graaf added. Fossil fuels account for less than 1% of the pension fund’s investments. As such, the decision to divest will not affect performance materially.
The pension fund aims to sell all of its fossil fuel holdings by the end of next year. Currently, the fund only excludes oil and gas firms that derive more than 5% of their revenue from “non-conventional” sources, such as shale oil and gas and oil sands.
The GP fund is not the first Dutch pension fund to divest entirely from fossil fuels. The hospitality sector scheme Horeca & Catering was the first to do so in 2021, later followed by the technology industry fund PME and the civil service scheme ABP, among others.
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