OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Maggie Nelmes, Chair, Isle of Wight Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Ed
We thank the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for raising the issue of how the Isle of Wight’s pension funds are being invested. And we thank OnTheWight for publishing the article and inviting the Isle of Wight Council to comment.
This climate-wrecking investment is alarming, and the many thousands of Islanders whose pensions are invested in it need to know. We are also concerned about the impact of the gas storage project on the health of residents in coastal Louisiana and Texas.
Climate concerns over fossil fuel investments
This issue also raises wider concerns. First, the systemic: while Isle of Wight councillors on the Pensions Fund Committee (PFC) have a statutory and fiduciary duty to their pension fund members to see that funds are invested ethically, they are in practice powerless to prevent harmful investments.
That is because the Isle of Wight’s pension funds are pooled with those of other Local Authorities. Now the Government has taken control of this pooling, so as to divert it into investments in government schemes. The Isle of Wight funds will be transferred to the Central Pool, and our councillors on the PFC will have no say in where that money is invested.
Councillors left with little say over pooled funds
The Council spokesperson told OnTheWight that fund managers must maximise returns on the PF investments, but this is not necessary because the funds already make significantly higher returns than what is needed to pay members’ pensions.
Besides, investing in fossil fuel projects is surely riskier in the long term than investing in renewable energy.
Links to arms companies and conflict zones
However, the funds are not just invested in fossil fuels, but also in companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon and in the killing and maiming of civilians in conflict zones elsewhere in the world – armaments companies.
And our government licences arms exports made in factories in the UK.
A motion blocked at every turn
For the past year, members of the Isle of Wight Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been backing a motion put by Councillor Chris Jarman, Chair of the Isle of Wight Pensions Fund Committee, calling for the divestment of our pension funds from the arms industry.
Yet at every Pensions Fund Committee meeting, in our view, Council officers have blocked debate and a vote on this issue, citing vague new legal constraints.
They have been instructed to do so by the Government. Rather than Local Authorities benefiting from the profits made from the PF investments to make up the serious shortfall in funding from central government, the Government is seizing this opportunity to use the funds for its own purposes, and presumably the profits to plug the gap in the nation’s economy.
