Brewin Dolphin: Why we withdrew £100m mandate from Woodford

In January 2018, Brewin Dolphin announced plans to reduce the costs on its MPS by £3m a year by switching 60% of the assets to manager of manager funds. 

The other 40% - investing in overseas equities, property and absolute return mandates - remain invested in retail funds. 

As part of the new structure, four underlying manager of manager funds were launched in February 2018, covering UK equities, UK equity income, North American equities and global bonds. 

At the time, it was announced that £100m of the UK equity income fund would be handed to Neil Woodford, manager of the £4.4bn Woodford Equity Income fund, to run as a segregated mandate.

However, this never happened as Brewin Dolphin decided not to proceed with Woodford's strategy. 

The firm's head of research Guy Foster explained: "Our fund analysts downgraded Woodford's main fund and so David Head - who runs the MPS and central solutions team - and I decided to withdraw. It worked out pretty well."

Woodford Equity Income is down 8% compared to the 25% rise in the IA UK All Companies sector over the three years to 29 March, FE data shows.

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Brewin Dolphin went ahead and handed segregated income mandates to the other three fund managers as announced in January last year; Columbia Threadneedle Investments (team based), Investec Asset Management (Blake Hutchins) and Man GLG (Henry Dixon).

The MPS launched in 2008 and has around £3bn in assets under management. The portfolios are rebalanced monthly.

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