On page 20 of our recently published January 2024 Newsletter we asked the question:

In the first 10 months of its existence the company Plymouth and South Devon Freeport Limited held no fewer than seven board meetings, or an average of one every six and a half weeks. In the 39 weeks since then not a single board meeting has been held. Either that, or the minutes of those meetings are no longer being posted on the Freeport’s website.
So do our Council’s representatives really know what’s actually going on?

Shortly after our Newsletter was first published, South Hams District Councillor and the Council’s representative on the Freeport Company board Cllr John Birch emailed to tell us the answer:

I have attended board meetings of the Freeport company on 6 June 2023, 7 September 2023 and 9 November 2023 and I can assure you I do know what is going on. In fact, tomorrow afternoon I am meeting a senior officer of the company to receive an update on various matters.
I will arrange for the minutes of the meetings mentioned above to be published on the Freeport website.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that nobody connected with the Freeport had previously noticed the Board minutes were no longer being published.

And, as you can read in the Newsletter, it’s still the case that ’Even after the report, Freeport concerns remain’.