The Hackney Green Party’s pledge to divest the council’s pension fund investments from companies allegedly supporting genocide has been challenged amid warnings from council officers over major risks to the fund.
After taking control of the council for the first time in May this year, following the borough elections, the Green administration has begun changing how the council’s pension pot is invested following campaign promises to start “full ethical divestment” from companies “complicit in territorial human rights violations”.
Prior to her election victory, the borough’s new Mayor, Zoë Garbett, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “People don’t want their money invested in firms like Elbit and Palantir – pension funds could be used to invest in housing, to help people locally instead.”
Both firms have been accused by Amnesty International of alleged complicity in Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, including genocide. But at a pension committee meeting held on 22 September 22, members were quizzed by former Labour councillor, Vincent Stops, about whether the council’s actions matched the Greens’ campaign rhetoric.
Brandishing a Green Party campaign leaflet, Stops said: “Hackney Green Party told residents Labour councillors and Hackney Council supported genocide in Gaza: investing in “companies like Elbit”. You, the Greens, demanded “divest now” [of] £30 million from its pension fund “from companies directly involved in Israel’s genocide”. He continued: “Please list those companies and the investment value you have or will divest from each?”
Izzy Castello-Cortes, the Green councillor who chairs the committee, said the council would provide these specific holdings in writing at a later date, as she reaffirmed that it was “looking into a policy that uses a series of lists and highlights core beliefs we believe are in the interests of pension scheme members”.
When pressed by Stops if this meant the council had “not divested anything from any companies involved in Israel’s genocide”, Castello-Cortes said: “As of today, we have taken some big steps in terms of looking into this.”
Speaking to the LDRS following the meeting, Stops said the Greens were “backtracking from their demands for immediate divestment now”. He has previously called on Garbett to “apologise to Labour councillors accused of supporting genocide in their squalid campaign”.
The amount of money Hackney has invested in firms linked to alleged human rights abuses, war crimes and genocide is disputed. In 2024, the council stated that the total pension fund was worth £1.994 billion and that roughly 0.2 per cent was “indirectly” exposed to firms listed on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) database of companies conducting business activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories “mainly through its equity portfolios”.
The council has offered various figures at different junctures, the smallest being £1.9 million, the largest £3.5 million. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has proffered a much larger figure, claiming roughly £106 million of Hackney’s pension was invested in “companies complicit in Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian human rights”. This was based on an analysis of 81 local government pension scheme (LGPS) funds.
The PSC previously put the number at £30 million, and the Green Party’s campaign leaflet, ‘Divest Now’, stated that Hackney Council invests “over £30 million” in companies “directly involved in Israel’s genocide”, but did not cite the PSC.
However, the £30 million figure was not included in the Green Party’s manifesto. Rather, the document pledged to “initiate a full ethical divestment process from companies complicit in genocide, apartheid or ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the West Bank, and other occupied Palestinian territories, as well as in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and other regions facing genocide, conflict and exploitation”. In June, the LDRS asked the Mayor’s office if she stood by the “over £30 million” figure used in her party’s campaign literature. The Mayor did not answer.
In 2024, the Labour pension committee chair of that time, Kam Adams, that the council’s pension fund did not invest in individual companies and that holdings belonged to “pooled” pension funds managed externally. The then Labour-run council also claimed it had been advised that pulling these indirect investments by leaving its pooled fund entirely to seek a “highly customised” alternative fund would cost over £2.1 million in the first year alone and over £10 million over five years, which “would risk financial detriment to the Fund and would therefore breach Law Commission guidance”.
However, in September 2025, the council declared it would “engage with” the London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV) – which manages London boroughs’ pension pots – to “create a framework that will enable future exclusions of investments linked to conflict, military occupation or genocide”. The Labour Mayor, Caroline Woodley, also committed to building the UN Genocide Convention into Hackney’s investment framework.
The LCIV manages London councils’ pooled pension investment vehicles and is meant to manage all their pension assets, while each council still sets its own fund’s strategy. The body says it “must remain neutral except where led by the UK government, for example in the case of sanctions”. Under recent reforms, LCIV said it required a “critical mass” of member funds to put ethical exclusions in place.
Hackney’s pensions committee agreed on 24 June 24 to review its “responsible investment strategy” and develop future exclusion criteria for its own fund. Castello-Cortes confirmed at the recent meeting that the government’s statutory guidance, published on 29 June, “stipulated that we cannot exclude specific named companies”.
Yet Hackney Council officers have now warned there is a “major” and “likely” risk that councillors on the committee would “make decisions based on [a] party manifesto, disregarding existing legislation, legal advice, financial impact and fiduciary duty”.
Addressing this at the meeting, assistant director for pensions investments and administration, Miriam Adams, said new statutory guidance made “very clear” that unlike other council panels, the pensions committee was “not political” and that acting politically could result in the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government intervening and “taking over a fund”. She added that we “hope that’s not going to be the case”.
However, Green councillor Charlie Lawrie said the committee was a “political body” which had a duty to observe risks to the pension fund and its members such as “environment and investment governance”.
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