Premier Miton Responsible UK Equity Fund

Sustainable, Responsible &/or ESG Policy:

Please refer to the Premier Miton Responsible UK Equity Fund’s Sustainability Report, for a comprehensive overview.

The fund managers focus on companies that act responsibly, those with strong environmental and social characteristics (sustainability characteristics) and those that are part of long-term themes that have a positive influence on society and the environment. The fund managers will analyse a company on a wide range of responsible factors and will use this information to ensure it meets the required standards. In addition, the fund managers seek to avoid investing in companies that have a negative societal or environmental impact.

 Sustainability characteristics and corporate governance criteria

The analysis of companies will typically consider characteristics and criteria such as:

• Corporate governance – female representation on boards, remuneration structure and disclosures
• Management – tenure, capability, clarity of strategy and policies Environmental and social impact of business – carbon emissions, resource usage and intensity, supply chain management and business ethics

Excluding companies with negative impacts

The fund managers seek to avoid investing directly in companies that are not consistent with the responsible investing themes and sustainability characteristics, including the following:

• Tobacco – greater than 10% of revenue
• Gambling – greater than 10% of revenue
• Promote irresponsible use of alcohol – any involvement
• Pornography – any involvement
• Fossil fuels – greater than 10% of revenue
• Banned weapons – any involvement
• Contravention of human rights – any involvement
• Animal cruelty or testing (except where such testing is required by regulators for product licensing purposes in a specific jurisdiction) – any involvement
• Assessed to pursue aggressive tax avoidance – any involvement
•  Manufacture of armaments – any involvement

Process:

The Ethical Screening ESG dataset assists the Fund Manager in reviewing companies’ performance against a number of areas to identify investments that score well against sustainability characteristics such as GHG emissions, energy consumption, waste generation, water usage, positive processes such as Net Zero commitments, negative processes such as environmental damage risk, positive product enhancement such as packaging, negative product impact such as life-cycle impacts, and social factors, such as living wage, health & safety, labour standards and supply chain assessment.

The Fund Manager also considers the following factors as part of its assessment as these can be indicators of good sustainability characteristics: corporate governance (including female representation on boards, remuneration structure and disclosures), management (including tenure, capability, clarity of strategy and policies) and sustainability of business (including barriers to entry, risks to assets, regulatory risk, innovation), as these can be indicators of good sustainability characteristics. A number of sources of information are employed in assessing these characteristics. These include meetings with company management, proprietary analysis (including company report and accounts and other reports and disclosures) and third party analysis including from our data providers such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Integrum ESG, TPI and CDP. The use of the ISS climate dataset, as an example, helps the Fund Manager consider companies that perform well against criteria such as carbon emissions, carbon intensity metrics and ISS’s custom Carbon Risk Rating. Using this information, each investment is assessed against relevant criteria to produce an overall score to ensure it meets the required standards.

The Fund Manager also monitors the profitability and financial strength of each investment alongside the responsible investment themes. For more information on the Fund’s investment policy and investment strategy see the latest version of the Fund prospectus.

Resources, Affiliations & Corporate Strategies:

In-House Resources

Responsible investing activities are directed by the Chief Investment Officer with implementation led by the Head of Responsible Investing, who is also the Deputy Chief Investment Officer, and a dedicated Responsible Investing Lead. Together they form an integrated responsible investing team that works closely with each investment team to support both the consideration of ESG data and research where appropriate, and engagement and voting.

Our experienced fund managers, who are split across 11 active investment teams, are tasked with stewardship and voting activities for each fund, supported by the Responsible Investing team. We believe this is the most effective approach given the fund managers’ knowledge of their portfolio companies and often long-term relationships with company management. This approach also ensures that the outcomes of stewardship activities are directly incorporated into investment decision-making.

An internal Stewardship Forum is held quarterly and aims to facilitate relevant discussions and share best practice on stewardship and responsible investing activities with the investment teams. Over the year, this has included updates on collaborative engagement activities, discussion of net zero targets and progress towards them, regulatory updates, discussion of clients’ stewardship expectations, and training on topics such as nature literacy.

Our Responsible Investing Oversight Committee owns the responsible investing strategy and monitors the responsible investing process to support our strategic objectives and comply with responsibilities to our stakeholders, including regulators and clients. This includes overseeing the integration of ESG factors in investment decision making, the implementation of stewardship activities, and publication of disclosures, as well as adherence to relevant rules and regulations. The Committee meets quarterly and is comprised of representatives from across the business including the Chief Investment Officer.

Third-party systems, research and data

We are committed to providing the resources required to support our stewardship activities. New systems, data and research are regularly reviewed to ensure we have access to the most appropriate research and systems. We utilise the proxy voting services of Institutional Shareholder Services (‘ISS’) and liaise regularly with them. We subscribe to ISS’s standard voting policy for UK and Ireland, which follows the UK Corporate Governance Code to make its voting recommendations. We monitor these recommendations closely, reviewing and highlighting to fund managers recommendations for additional analysis. We currently subscribe to several independent providers of ESG data and research including ISS ESG, Ethical Screening, Integrum ESG, and Net Purpose. We also use data providers such as Bloomberg, Morningstar, CDP and the Transition Pathway Initiative to enhance our understanding of the nature of our investments, and to assess external scoring and analysis of our funds. We regularly meet all our ESG data and research providers.

Memberships and Affiliations

We are actively involved in several industry-wide initiatives to promote well-functioning markets where we believe we can have an influence and where we believe it is helpful for our views to be heard.

• UK Stewardship Code – We have been signatories to the UK Stewardship Code since 2021. Our 2026 Reports, which relate to information from the calendar year of 2025, can be downloaded on the Responsible Investing page of our website.
• Investment Association (IA) – We support the work of the IA, participating in a wide variety of committees and working groups, including the Climate change working group, SFDR Forum, Derivatives Committee, Financial Crime Committee, Fixed Income Trading Committee, Investment Funds Committee and Overseas Fund Regime Working Group.
• Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) - We became a signatory to the PRI in 2020. We monitor the collaboration platform for relevant engagement opportunities. We are also a member of the Global Policy Reference Group and engage regularly with the UK policy team.
• Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) - We support the transition to a net-zero carbon economy having become a signatory to the NZAM in 2022. We participated in the review of the initiative during 2025 and remain committed following the strategy’s relaunch in February 2026.
• Investor Forum – We joined the Investor Forum in 2022 to facilitate collective engagement on material issues with listed UK companies and work with other UK investors on policy matters.
• Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) - Our Head of Equities Gervais Williams is the President of the QCA, an organisation which champions the UK’s community of more than 1000 small and mid-sized publicly traded businesses.
• Global Listed Infrastructure Organisation (GLIO) - Fund manager Jim Wright is a member of the GLIO Advisory Committee.
• CFA – We support staff who wish to study the CFA Sustainable Investing Certificate, and the CFA Climate Risk, Valuation, and Investing Certificate.
• Association of Investment Companies (AIC) – AIC exists to support and represent a broad range of investment companies, investment trusts, VCTs and other closed-ended funds, by engaging with members, investors and the wider financial community. We are also invited to contribute to their response to proposed legislative changes, and to take part in promotional activity such as investor conferences and press articles.

We review the list of initiatives of which we are a member annually to ensure that these remain appropriate and aligned with our requirements.

SDR Labelling:

Unlabelled - promotes sustainable characteristics (has CFD)

SDR Literature:

• Sustainability factsheet
• Sustainability product report