A MAJOR consultation on whether a public sector pension fund in the West should continue investing in arms will begin in September.

The £6-billion Avon Pension Fund administers the local government pension scheme for the former county of Avon and has 140,000 members from more than 450 employers.

But it has been under pressure to divest from companies involved in the arms trade after campaigners warned their pensions were being used to fund human rights abuses by Israeli forces in Palestine.

Campaigners had initially called for the fund to divest from companies specifically connected to Palestine but, after warnings that an investment strategy based on a particular conflict would be hard to defend legally, the Avon Pension Fund Committee debated divesting from all companies in the aerospace and defence sector.

At the meeting in March, the committee voted 10 to three to keep the status quo — but the decision is only in principle until the scheme’s 140,000 members have been consulted on what they want to happen.

Now the fund has said that a procurement process for someone to run the consultation has been completed, and the survey will begin in September.

Migration of administration systems, regulatory deadlines, the changes to investment pooling, and the summer holiday period are all understood to have factored in to the consultation not beginning until September.

The £6-billion fund has said it currently has £18-million — 0.3 per cent of its total assets — invested in aerospace and arms companies.

Rather than having directly purchased shares in arms companies, the Avon Pension Fund’s investments are part of a passive equity pool, a financial product splitting money across thousands of companies, called the Brunel Fund which the pension fund chose to invest in because of its climate credentials.

The Brunel fund already excludes businesses making controversial weapons such as cluster munitions and chemical weapons, or those which breach a UN principle on businesses making sure they are not complicit in human rights abuses. Lockheed Martin and RTX are already excluded from the fund’s portfolios on these grounds.

Chair of the committee Paul Crossley (Southdown, Liberal Democrat) said: “From my own personal point of view, I have visited Palestine twice and have seen many of the issues that people have raised here.”

However, campaigners said they then faced “a complete U-turn” from the tone and stance of that meeting. When the committee met in March, councillors warned that the companies also supplied weapons for Britain’s own defence and Ukraine’s against the Russian invasion.

Tony Mayo, a children’s social worker and Unison activist at Bath and North East Somerset Council, who is a member of the Avon Pension Fund, told the meeting in March: “The money that I have earned by trying tirelessly, at grave personal cost, to keep children safe is being used to fund the weapons that kill my brothers’ and sisters’ children abroad.

“For every day I work, I’m unwillingly contributing to genocide and war.”