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Hackney releases heavily redacted messages regarding 7 October deadline decision
While council workers originally suggested a longer timeline, Green Mayor Zoe Garbett wanted a more rapid process - though she herself did not specify that date
Hackney Council has finally sent heavily redacted correspondence regarding the decision to de-twin from Haifa and to send its Mayor a letter asking him for a response by “7 October 2026” – despite the governing Green party having pledged to bring back “greater transparency, communication and accountability back to Hackney’s local government.”
Jewish News submitted a Freedom of Information Request to Hackney Council after widespread communal anger when Mayor Zoe Garbett wrote to Haifa’s Mayor, Yona Yahav, specifically requesting a response to the Green plans to break the twinning agreement “by 7 October 2026”.
The correspondence – the majority of which has been blacked out – means that the council has not revealed who initially proposed the 7 October deadline. Nor does it show any of the messages sent in the immediate aftermath of the widespread public anger at Hackney council having selected that date – the third anniversary of the 7 October attacks.
It does show, however, that the initial plan, as described on 26 July, was for the process of consulting about de-twinning to “run until the end of October”, followed by “the working group meeting in November to formulate its recommendations, and a final decision at full council in January.”
However, it appears that the elected Mayor of Hackney, the Green party’s Zoe Garbett, pushed for the process to be expedited; an e-mail two days later says: “The Mayor is keen that we make a decision at November full council if possible. I’ve explained that this will probably be too tight, but I would suggest we conclude the engagement on 7 October (avoiding the Jewish holidays, and allowing ten weeks) which would leave the window open to a November decision dependent on how many responses we receive and how long it takes to complete the EqIA [Equalities Impact Assessment]”.
Some 98 percent of the remaining e-mails in this chain are redacted, meaning that it is impossible to see whether anyone flagged if there was an issue of designating the third anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as the date by which an Israeli Mayor had to respond to a letter telling him that maintaining twinning with his city was “at odds with our anti racist values”.
With regards to its response, Hackney Council breached its Freedom of Information requirements by failing to respond within the specific time period allotted to it, even after availing itself of an extra few weeks by citing a specific clause, Section 36 (weighing the public interest) of the Freedom of Information Act.
The council only responded to the Jewish News FOI request on Wednesday – the same day that a public consultation into the council’s de-twinning vote closed. A separate FOI request from a member of the public, asking for details on how much the de-twinning efforts had cost, was also responded to on Wednesday, with the council having similarly breached its deadline.
In its response to the finances FOI request, the only spending the Borough attributed to the review was £1,800, excluding VAT, for external counsel from Barristers, with the fee coming out of the council’s legal services budget. A review is described as “resourced in-house”, so the staff cost is unknown rather than nil. With regards to the next phase, which includes the equalities assessment, consultation and working group, the council said only that costs “will be met from existing council resources”, without providing any estimate of said cost.
The submitter of the financial FOI request told Jewish News: “It took 52 working days and two missed deadlines of its own for Hackney to tell me it spent £1,800 on a barrister and kept no record of staff time. The sum is small. The handling isn’t. If the answer was always this simple, why did it need a section 36 extension to give it?”
In its 2026 Manifesto, Hackney Green Party wrote: “We will bring greater participation, transparency, communication and accountability back to Hackney’s local government.”
In Zoe Garbett’s 2023 pledge for the Mayoralty, the first sentence included a commitment “to open the council up to more public scrutiny.”
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