The £1.8bn (€2.7bn) pension fund of UK retailer John Lewis has for the first time allocated money to infrastructure, following a number of pension funds who entered the asset class in 2006, and is also poised to double its allocation to commodities.

Andrew Chapman, pension investment manager at John Lewis Partnership Pension Trust, said the fund had appointed M&G Investments to an infrastructure mandate worth £25m. M&G is the asset management arm of UK insurer Prudential. Funding for the infrastructure mandate will come from cash.