Transcript

And thank you so much for your attendance at this afternoon's property and investments executive subcommittee meeting here at the John Maple room at Dean House in Johnson. Those are some people who may not know me, I'm Bill Revens, I'm the leader of some of the council, it's my privilege to share this committee and to start by thanking Liz Lisham who's chaired the last two while I've been indisposed on annual leave or all the, it is very much appreciated, thank you. Can I just do the preamble to the meeting, just to remind you that it's only the subcommittee members present in the room that take the decisions at this meeting. Members are in attendance to here to provide advice, there are no planned fire drills today. In the event of a fire alarm, please follow the fire exit signs and then congregate in the car park to the rear of the building, if anyone present might need assistance in acting building, then you would need to let one of the democratic services team know. The agenda and papers have been published on the council's website in advance of the meeting and the council recognise the importance of striking a balance between providing opportunities for people to lawfully express their views and any unacceptable behaviours or action that cause disruption which will lead to our meetings being adjourned. The council will be making a recording of the meeting and this will be published in due course. So today's meeting will be run using a hybrid format until such time as a motion is passed to exclude press and public. Physical attendance will be required to observe or participate in the confidential part of item four, which is on reports on tasks from the April 24 subcommittee meeting and item five investment properties disposal. Committee members and key officers who are physically present here at the John Meekall room at Deanhouse, Taunton and other elected members and officers may physically or remotely join the meeting to speak on specific agenda items or observe noting the physical attendance requirement for private session. The meeting is broadcast and therefore other members of the public and partners can observe the meeting remotely. If you are on, I'm seeing messages that believe that there's no sound online is that? It's fine. Yes. It's just so. Okay. I don't know whether we're, there's another message from Sue. Is she sorted? Okay. Sound is. Sound is working. Okay. So people can hear here, hear me burbling on excellent. So cancer evidence to further highlight the following hybrid meeting practice to use the meeting chat function only for the purposes of the meeting and telling me whether they can hear me or not. And if members are called to speak, could they say their name before speaking? And I just emphasize the importance of turning off microphones and cameras when not invited to speak. Okay. Apologies for absence, do we have any apologies? None. No apologies. Okay. Thank you very much. And declarations of interest, except where there are city town and parish council memberships, which are otherwise advertised, no. Public question time, there were no public questions submitted by the time of the official published deadline. However, we did have one late questions submitted. Can you just remind me who that was from? Alison Morgan. Thank you. Alison, are you in? I can see you now. I'm happy to give you to use my discretion to allow you to speak after the deadline at another time. We might not be able to facilitate that because it's a late question. We don't have a formal answer for you in direct response, but a written answer will be forthcoming after our meeting. So thank you very much. And your three minutes starts now. That one? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Um, councilors, um, today I'm here to appeal directly to you and to this committee and to the council as a whole, to do the thing that you know you must do, which is to evict Albert from your premises at, as tech West, and to do immediately. And before you dispose of the premises, which I know you must do eventually. Firstly, I would like to thank you for all your hard work on this challenging and very distressing matter today. As we speak in this pleasant room, in this apparently peaceful country, the full might of the Israeli army, the fifth largest army in the world, and one of the best equipped militaries in the world is invading the little town of Rafa in the southern Garza strip. The town that the Israeli government told the Garzaan people and the entire world would be safe. The town that the Israeli military has been chasing the entire Garzaan population to for the last seven months, telling them that they must move there and they would be safe. There have we heard these lies before, all through the last seven months, when this barbaric Israeli government has told the Garzaan people to move from town to town. And each time they have moved, the Israeli military has bombed them in the places that they have been told to move to. They have bombed every hospital in Garza. They have destroyed every university, every school. They have bombed and destroyed the third oldest Christian church in the world. And almost every other church and mosque and the UN refuges that people were seeking refuge in, where they had a right to expect to be safe. Today, over one and a half million Palestinian civilians are crowded into Rafa, a town that was originally for 250,000 people, a small town that was already the most, in what was already the most densely populated place on Earth. Half of these people are children, all of them are innocent civilians. Most of them are living in tents. They have almost no food, no water, medical provisional sanitation. All this is because of the Israeli government which has been blocking the entry of humanitarian aid for months, operating a policy of deliberate starvation. These people, one and a half million of them, have absolutely no protection from what this genocidal Israeli apartheid regime clearly intends to do next in Rafa. And the greatest shame of this is that we are all complicit in it. The British government, past and present, is highly responsible for that fate that has fallen the Palestinian people today and in the past. Today, the British government, pardon? Just be drawing your remarks to a place you've had for three minutes, thank you very much. Back in February, a team of highly qualified and specialised lawyers from Public Interest Law Centre supplied this government with extensive details, this council, with extensive detailed evidence about Albert systems, detailed evidence proving that the Bristol-based company is wholly owned by Albert Israel and is part of that company and it is also the owner of several other sites in the country where arms are made and this company has export licences to Israel. Yes, the end users may include the British MOD and it also includes Israel. We are supplying weapons from this country, from a company controlled by the premises at Bristol, Albert at Aztec West and all its subsidiaries have applied for many export licences. As we have seen over the last few months, the Israelis tell a lot of lies, they lied every time they told the Garza people to do it, just a moment. They lied when they called the war against Hamas, a war against the Palestinian people and now look at what is happening today in Gaza. Your officers have been to meet with Albert systems in Bristol and we will report back to you today. Will you believe what this Israeli company is telling your officers? Shouldn't you rather be believing what public interest lawyers centre and Palestine action and members of your own colleagues like Brian Smedley and others have been telling you? Clearly, under international law and UK domestic law, Somerset Council has a duty to prevent genocide. Clearly, as long as you allow Albert systems to remain at Aztec West, you are complicit in genocide and you are making us the people of Somerset complicit in that genocide. What decision are you going to make today? The day that the Israeli military are invading Rafa. Will Somerset Council go down in history as the council, the very day, the very week that the Israeli military invaded Rafa where a million and a half people are seeking refuge, that this council makes a decision to allow that genocidal company to go on supplying arms to that genocidal government? Or will this council do the right thing and evict Albert today? Thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to come here and speak to us and share your very passionately held views. We remain in a very difficult situation with looking and exploring ways to step away from this commercial investment that we inherited from one of our predecessor councils and we have taken the decision at full council at the last meeting of this executive subcommittee to look for ways to do that. We will respond to your written questions in due course and we do thank you so much for coming and expressing your views so passionately. So first of all on item four, we have a report on the tasks from the April 2024 subcommittee meeting which is on pages 7 to 12 of our agenda back and I would like to invite Mr. Ollie Woodams and Mr. Robert Oret to report back please. Thank you Chair. Yes, I can report that that we inspected the premises at Aztec West as requested by the subcommittee. The details of that report are details of information we found are commercially confidential so we will have to cover those in the private session hence the recommendation to move to a private session for the consideration of the confidential appendix on the report. I have also reviewed options which contain legally privileged information that we will share with members of the committee and other councillors in confidential session. Do I have any comments or questions from members of the committee on that report? Thank you. Do I have a proposal to go into the private session? I'm sorry I can't take points of order or interruptions from the floor. I'm really sorry but we have to be guided by the legal process to be able to do the safe legal process. We are fully aware of the public interest but our aim in today's meeting is to make a safe and legal decision. So we have a proposal to go into confidential session proposed by Councillor Wakefield, seconded by Councillor Wijk. The subcommittee agrees the case for applying exemption information provision as set out in local government Act 1972 scheduled 12A and therefore treat the attached confidential appendix in confidence as it contains commercially sensitive information and as the case for the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing that information. Be to consider passing a resolution having been duly proposed and seconded under schedule 12A as a local government Act 1972 to exclude the press and public from the meeting on the basis that if they were present during the business to be transacted there would be a likelihood of disclosure of exempt information within the meaning for schedule 12A as the local government Act 1972. So I read the proposal out, it's been proposed and seconded to leave the meeting. Can I just check whether I followed the correct procedure? Apologies, James. There's an opportunity for the committee still to hear the public report on item 5 before moving into conclusion. Okay, do I have a proposal to take the beginning of item 5 before we move into that session that has been proposed and seconded? Okay, so we will thank you for the advice Mr. Waldridge. We will move to item 5 investment properties disposal, ages 13 to 20 and cover the public session there and then we will go back to the proposal that's been proposed and seconded to exclude press and public. Okay, and so we move on to item 5 and I'd like to invite Robert Oretz to report. Chair, the context for this report is the overall decision already made to dispose of the schmersion investment portfolio over the next two, three years and aiming for best self-hosts reasonably obtainable. The report relates to disposal of specific assets and all details related to those are in the confidential appendix. So I and a matter back to you with the request that we would move this paper into confidential session also. I'm advised that there is no time scale but we will communicate as soon as we are able. It is all we can say at that moment at this moment. Okay, so we need a separate proposal for item 4 and 5. Can I do them both on the proposal? Okay, I'll take Councillor Smedley. The crops of the matter at hand is the considerations to weather what albit in Bristol is doing and we're going to hear that in confidential session. But the motion where this arose from came from a public session meeting. Can I make a speech in reference to that at this point in time or would that resist your discussions? So my understanding is that the items under discussion here are as a result of the outcome of the last meeting of the subcommittee and not as direct result but an indirect result of the motion at full council. So I'm currently minded to take your contribution in closed session. You want to come back? I would refer to stuff that has already been in public session which is relevant to what you're talking about. I'm not sure why that would need to go into public session or private session where, of course, I can say the same thing again, but the public interest is what the officers have found out from their visit to albit in Bristol, isn't it? So the item on the agenda or the items on the agenda are relating to the reports coming back from the last subcommittee meeting. And the advice that we've had, it was speaking to those reports, is that they, both Mr. Woodams and Mr. Ora to advise that those reports need to be held in private session. If you are going to speak more widely than that then that would suggest you're not speaking on those items. So I'm not sure on which agenda item you are speaking. Would you be able to clarify, Mr. Councillor interjecting? Well, I think the key point of interest is when the public will know the outcome of those discussions and your decision after today here in the evidence, the great weight of evidence that you've had to consider that when will the public be able to get those answers? I think I've already said that we will communicate those as soon as we are able. And we need, we are aware of the commercial confidentiality that surrounds them. And we just need to make sure that any public statement on that is clearly in lines with that commercial confidentiality. Is that what it would be? I'm not sure it will be. I don't think we can set timescale on it. Okay, so I have a proposal and a seconder for a resolution to go into private session. We've read out the words directly. Can I see those in favour of going into private session, please? Those against going into private session. Okay, we need to make a safe and legal decision. And that is why we need to go into private and come into the actual session. So I would ask members of the public who are present to kindly leave. Thank you. Yes, members of the Council are allowed to remain in set sessions that are private and confidential. And Councils Medley and I have had that conversation before the meeting and I've assured him that that will be the case. I'll just ask on the legal officer whether she's able to advise on that, I think it is something we would take into due consideration would be my initial reaction. In chair, it's very difficult for you to ask that question because you're looking at reports that you've already decided are going to be dealt with in confidential session. I understood you to be referring to the decision to move into confidential session when you were mentioning safe and legal. Yeah, I was referring, you're absolutely correct. I was referring specifically to us making a safe and legal decision in terms of the constitution of Somerset Council. Yes, any decision that we would have to make in a broader sense would also have to be safe and legal. And that's why we have the professional advice that we have in the room and why we have read any additional advice that has been kindly offered to the Council as well and taken that into consideration. Yes, I believe that has been drawn to our attention. Thank you. Okay, so the statement was a clarification and that the motion had a technical inaccuracy within it. I mean, that was apologize for but it doesn't go further than that. I think we need to get on and be able to transact the business of the Council. I thank you so much for your attendance and we will communicate the outcome as soon as we are able. Thank you. Okay, I've invited the public to leave. It's now your choice whether to do so or not and then we would need to need to adjourn the meeting if not. [BLANK_AUDIO]