Did ESCC spend over £1.4k ‘protecting’ itself from divestment mince pies?

Following HOT’s recent story about ‘absurd’ security at County Hall, climate campaigners staged an eight-person protest at County Hall on Tuesday. Gabriel Carlyle reports on what happened.

Several Hastings & St Leonards residents travelled to Lewes to take part in the 12 December protest.

As we approached the Hall we wondered whether or not East Sussex County Council (ESCC) Leader Keith Glazier would be foolish enough to employ 40 security guards (at a cost of £6,700) to ‘protect’ County Hall from a protest entitled: ‘ESCC: Stop wasting our money on “absurd” security & divest from fossil fuels instead’.

It turns out he wasn’t. But he was foolish enough to hire at least nine security guards (we suspect ten) to do so and to erect a security barrier across the front of County Hall.

Numbered days

The protest had been timed to coincide with ESCC’s last Cabinet meeting of the year, as well as the final day of the UN Climate Conference (COP28).

ESCC and the East Sussex Pension Fund (which ESCC adminsters) have been the focus of a ten-year campaign by East Sussex and Brighton residents, calling on the Fund to stop investing in the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis.

The Fund, which covers Brighton & Hove as well as East Sussex, currently has tens of millions of pounds of local people’s pension monies invested in oil and gas companies like Shell and BP.

Divest East Sussex argues that, by clinging on to its remaining investments
in fossil fuel companies (which now amount to only 0.6% of the Fund) ESCC is effectively providing a fig-leaf for these companies’ ongoing attempts to block effective climate action and missing a huge opportunity to show real leadership on the climate crisis

This year’s COP28 was dogged by scandals involving fossil fuel lobbyists but still closed with an agreement that, for all its flaws, ‘secured the first UN climate agreement that calls on all countries to “transition away from fossil fuels,” sending an unprecedented signal to the fossil fuel industry that its days are numbered’.

£1.4k on mincepies?

Last month a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that ESCC had wasted over £30k on security guards to ‘protect itself’ from the likes of email questions, petition hand-ins and fasters.

For example, on 20 July ESCC spent £6,758 hiring 40 additional security personnel to ‘guard’ the Hall from the ‘Fast for Fossil Fuel Divestment’, a tiny and completely peaceful vigil of (at its peak) seven people.

On Tuesday we displayed a sign demanding that East Sussex County Council ‘stop wasting our money on “absurd” security & divest from fossil fuels instead’, as well as a giant grid showing the £30k+ of public money already wasted so far this year.

And we offered homemade mince pies to all of the security personnel present at the Hall, most of whom were delighted to have some relief from standing-around pointlessly outside the Hall.

Based on past figures – obtained using the Freedom of Information Act – ESCC probably spent over £1.4k on the ‘security’ for the protest. Divest East Sussex is submitting another Freedom of Information Act request to find out …

Asleep at the wheel

ESCC’s Full Council had originally been scheduled to meet on 5 December, also during COP28.

However, that meeting was cancelled because, according to an email from Democratic Services: ‘there was only one item for the whole council to consider, in that context it was felt that summoning all 50 councillors for one item would not be appropriate’.

Meanwhile, as ESCC snoozes at the wheel, the climate crisis continues to deepen, with new research concluding that keeping the 1.5°C goal alive ‘now requires us to hit net-zero globally by 2034 rather than by 2050’.

Divest East Sussex is holding a Time to Divest ‘march of the giant letters’ to County Hall on 6 February – the date of ESCC’s last meeting before its next vote on fossil fuel divestment.

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