It’s lucrative in the North! City-money man plans investment fund in Yorkshire and the North East

Talk to any man or woman from Yorkshire and they will be immensely proud of their birthright.

But not everyone will be aware of the number of brilliant companies in their region, or across Teesside and Tyneside – let alone invest in them.

As any proud Yorkshireman, like Compo in the TV series Last Of The Summer Wine, would tell you, ‘Where there’s mud, there’s copper’. The region is brimming with business opportunities.

Northern stars include Hull sausage maker Cranswick, Tyneside baker Greggs and software giant Sage.

To encourage local people to support their local businesses, a city financier is setting up a fund aimed at private investors and focusing exclusively on businesses in Yorkshire and the North East of England.

Simon Hooper, former operations director at Hosking Partners, is from the Midlands, but his wife is from the Beverley area, near Hull.

Hooper, 44, says spending time with her made him realise this is “the most fantastic province”.

He is raising £20m to set up the Yorkshire and North East Investment Trust, which is expected to open to investors in the next 12 months and later list on the London Stock Exchange.

“It’s all well and good to own Google or Amazon stock, but they’re too far away from you,” Hooper said. “Unless you have an iPhone in your pocket, you can’t identify with them. If they’re further away, you can. People are proud to own local company stock.”

The trust will operate like any other. It will start with a pot of money that will be used to invest in a range of companies. Private investors and large institutions such as pension funds will then be able to buy shares in the trust.

This gives them a small stake in local companies, but spreads the risk. They don’t have to invest a lot of money in one particular stock, which can end badly if the stock price of that company plummets.

In addition to shares, the trust can also buy bonds from local lenders such as Skipton Building Society.

Hooper says he acted after witnessing two scandals in which ordinary people were left behind, and fears many have been put off from the stock market forever.

The first was the 2019 collapse of the £3.7bn Woodford Equity Income Fund, run by star stock-picker Neil Woodford. Around 300,000 people lost money when the fund was frozen, and millions of pounds in compensation is still owed.

The second was the rise and fall of a Yorkshire company, Sirius Minerals, which was acquired by Anglo American in early 2020 when it was teetering on the brink of collapse. Sirius began developing a huge potash mine beneath the North York Moors National Park and at its peak had more than 80,000 private investors, many of them local.

Some lost their savings when the company’s share price plummeted and Anglo bought it at a bargain price.

Hooper said: ‘There are some brilliant businesses in Yorkshire and the North East. We have the opportunity to help them grow.’

He said a strong base of private shareholders could make companies less vulnerable to foreign takeovers, which are now commonplace. He added: ‘It is painful when yet another company listed on the London Stock Exchange is taken over. Part of our job is to prevent that as much as possible.’