Social and Sustainable Finance
Our Social and Sustainable Finance team are specialists in social impact finance. As a firm we advise a wide variety of not-for-profit organisations, including charities, statutory bodies, ecclesiastical entities and social housing providers, who are often charitable and whose motivations typically go beyond “the bottom line”. Our Social and Sustainable Finance team is highly experienced in supporting these clients in all funding and sustainable finance scenarios, including bank debt (increasingly sustainability-linked and green/social funding), institutional finance and capital markets (private placements and bonds), as well as complex restructures and partnership arrangements.
Our expertise ensures the optimal outcome for our clients with the regulatory frameworks in which they operate.
We work closely with our specialist social housing teams throughout the firm, including: Charging, Charities and Social Enterprises, Construction, Corporate and Commercial, Investment, Governance, Local and Central Government, Planning, Real Estate, Social Housing and Tax.
What we can help with:
- Bank funding
- Capital markets funding (including both public bonds and private placements)
- Bespoke finance structures
- Joint ventures, partnerships and SPVs
- Mergers and restructures
- Derivatives
- Funder consents
- Governance and vires
Recent experience
Sustainable finance and ESG:
- Advising charitable borrowers including housing associations on sustainability-linked bank debt.
- Supporting various housing association clients in producing their sustainable finance frameworks, considering sustainable finance and other key issues such as funding retrofit/decarbonisation.
- Running forums for charitable clients to discuss and share knowledge on their ESG strategies and next steps.
Advising not-for-profit organisations:
- Advising Greenham Trust, a charitable entity, on a £25 million secured private placement.
- Acting for Greenwich Hospital, a Crown charity which serves retired personnel of the Naval Service and their families through grants to Naval Charities, in respect of its first ever financing.
- Advising almshouse charity on precedents forms for arms-length intra-group debt.
- Advising a statutory port authority on a private placement to fund capital infrastructure dredging.