NWEF Conference falls victim to lack of attendees

National Wellbeing & Engagement Forum – NWEF (Formerly NAMF)  June 2017 didn’t happen!

A brief trawl of the Foreign Office’s travel advice for HR types thinking of paying a visit to Newcastle City Centre Police Station, Newcastle Upon Tyne Friday 9th June 2017 at 10am probably didn’t warn people that’s it’s not the best idea to attend a NWEF conference hosted by Northumbria police – with the ever present threat of catching a serious infectious disease which, once it has control of a person, causes them to spew forth incoherent babble from the bowels of the voicebox.

National Wellbeing & Engagement Forum – NWEF (Formerly NAMF) JUNE 2017 – a Freedom of Information request to Northumbria Police

Please provide full disclosure of the following: National Wellbeing & Engagement Forum – NWEF (Formerly NAMF) – Northumbria Police The meeting was held Friday 9th June 2017 at 10am, Newcastle City Centre Police Station, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Of course, we don’t think the the meeting was cancelled due to a contagious lurgy.  All HR minions love to go on an extravagant all-expenses paid junket.  So why didn’t the June 2017 NWEF-fest go ahead?  Apparently no-one wanted to go!

In response to your request above, The National Wellbeing and Engagement
Forum (NWEF) meeting scheduled for June 2017 was cancelled due to the
limited availability of members.Northumbria Police Data Protection and Disclosure Advisor

Perhaps the acolytes of Wirz are becoming disbelievers…

 

 

 

NWEF Conference falls victim to lack of attendees
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10 thoughts on “NWEF Conference falls victim to lack of attendees

  • 2017-09-01 at 1:41 pm
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    Methinks that bit by bit everyone is realising that the King really isn’t wearing any clothes.

    Also there is a dawning realisation that WIRZ has been skating around on a very thin veneer of bullshit for quite some time.

    I just hope all those band 1’s placed at the lowest possible level rise up and seek recompense for being denied what is rightly theirs.

    They sowed the wind, now they must reap the whirlwind.

  • 2017-08-31 at 11:18 pm
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    These former employers hand picked and trained their former officers to step where others fear to tread and investigate wrong doing and bring those offenders to task.

    Now some of these Police Pension Authorities (Chief Constables) who are acting contrary to the Regulations are finding that their injured former officers are not an easy push over and will fight back for these Regulations to be applied justly and fairly.

    Did they really expect any other outcome? Clearly some Chiefs listened to the siren call of that incompetent lawyer, Wirz and continue to throw good public money after bad in pursuit of a process that is unlawful and fataly flawed.

    How long before common sense prevails and these rogue Chiefs start applying the Regulations properly without their own make believe interpretation of the rules ?

  • 2017-08-31 at 4:13 pm
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    Victory for common sense over crass stupidity.

    Well ask yourself the question. Would you want to be associated with an organisation which is headed by losers who find difficulty in winning anything because they fight causes that they have insufficient knowledge of which are just unwinnable. They may spout the kinds of stuff that bean counters love to hear, but in reality how much have they saved any of the organisations which their members come from.

    The reality is that they have saved nothing and in all probability cost their organisation thousands in the process.

    Look at Staffordshire. They are trying to review what is believed to be in the region of 300 IOD’s. Take off those over 72 and terminally ill, although I don’t see that in the regulations, that leaves a good proportion who will be put through the mental torture of what DCC Baker said will take 18 months to complete.

    Now CC Morgan has come in and said as the PPA he alone will make a judgement of how the reviews are going and whether they will continue. Well Mr Morgan we are now in day 135 since the letters went out and the SMP hasn’t managed one review yet. Yes that correct NOT ONE. That’s almost a quarter of the way through the 18 months time scale and not one reduction in banding. No money saved, but plenty spent. How much is Andrew Coley being paid to write to Band 1 IOD’s pleading with them not to continue with their SAR. In the 135 days alone its probably upwards of £14K. What about the extra decision makers being employed in the Central Disclosure Unit at upwards of £36k a year for the two.

    Well that’s real value for money, and we all know the real reason behind this process, the desire to save money. Just as the Avon and Somerset PCC Sue Mountstevens tried to get the Home Office Minister Damian Green into her way of thinking with her begging letter to him back in August 2013.

    Well it won’t save you money, because there is something called Karma. Yes your actions have caused this. Your desire to walk roughshod over retired defenceless former officer having no regard for their well being in a process that will last up to 547 days will have the effect of increasing costs both for extra staff and SMP’s who in all honesty must be laughing all the way to the bank. All this to try and do the undoable. And what about the can of worms you have opened with disabled former officers now realising that for years they have been underpaid according to the regulations.

    The back payments and interest that you have literally stolen from those disabled former officers by your unlawful manipulation of the Regulations will run into the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pounds.

    Good luck ’cause you will need it !!

  • 2017-08-31 at 9:30 am
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    Surprised? Not really. There I am, an HR professional, (two words that should never be seen together), bumbling along to work in my new, leased, company BMW (paid for by the taxpayer), in the sunshine thinking all is well in the Police HR world. Then the penny drops. That cunning plan that I had to save my force millions by screwing over vulnerable, isolated, injured police heroes has gone wrong. All to do with IODPA and their legal team. They are not lying down and turning over, they’ve joined IODs together all around the country, they are fighting back, we keep loosing JR s. Proper Doctors won t work with us, ‘independent’ SMPs are being outed, challenged, caught out, criticised and complained about to the GMC. When the bubble bursts its going to cost the force even more money and I ll be to blame, I might even lose the beemer (HR talk). Probably the best plan now is to put plenty of distance between me and this review thingy and pass it on to some lowly HR unprofessional down the office who I can blame later on. I won t go to any more of those NAF, NERF, TWERP, or whatever they call themselves this week, meetings, it’s not doing my career any good.

    Don’t feel any sympathy or pity for the HR drones who get up one day and decide on a whim as a career progression to mess up your life. We all know who pull the strings and runs Police Forces these days and it certainly isn’t the new breed of weak, disposable Chief Constables.

  • 2017-08-30 at 1:25 pm
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    Northumbria Police and Wirzy, hahahaha! I’m laughing at you. hahahahaha!

  • 2017-08-30 at 11:25 am
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    It could well be that it is holiday season, but even better if it’s that the attendees of these forums have actually READ the rules and regulations? 🙂

  • 2017-08-30 at 8:27 am
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    Declaration of interest: I am a member of IODPA. I address this comment to all decent HR managers and others who work in the HR and Occupational Health departments of police forces up and down the country,

    IODPA knows that the majority of you are doing your best, often under difficult circumstances. We know that you are often under pressure to produce results, meet targets, etc. We know all about the box ticking mentality, the endless layers of supervision, the way that so many people and organisations seem to want to have their say in what you do and how you do it. We are sadly familiar with arrogant and overbearing senior officers who know nothing, yet think they know everything.

    We also know that you get little or no training on police injury awards and how injury pensions should be administered. That area of your responsibilities has become deeply complex. The Regulations can be difficult – they are not well written, and they need to be understood with the aid of several vitally important decisions made by the Administrative Court and by the Pensions Ombudsman.

    It is no small wonder that you looked upon the NAMF/NWEF for help and guidance. There you found discussion, presentations and legal updates. BUT they all emanate from one very dubious source.

    If you have been reading these blogs you will have seen the name Nicholas Wirz appear frequently. We have tried to alert you to the dangers of listening to anything he has to say. This is a man who thinks he is the Sir Mo Farah of legal world. A champion solicitor who knows all there is to know about police ill health and injury pensions.

    In truth, he is nothing of the sort. His track record is one defeat after another. He is the fool who threatened vulnerable disabled former officers so as to stop them appealing to a PMAB against a decision to reduce their injury pensions to band one because of their age.

    He is the man who could not see what was so very plain for anyone with any common sense to see – that the Home Office guidance contained in Annex C to HO circular 46/2004 was stupidly unlawful. Most forces chose to ignore that guidance, but Wirz saw it as a way to rob pensioners.

    He is the man who produced and ran a training event at the College of Policing, which convinced some gullible SMPs that they were equivalent to a Judge, with a Judge’s powers. His training was a parody of errors, containing such gems as quoting a Scottish court case as having application in England and Wales.

    He is the man who selectively quotes from court cases so as to give the impression that a course of action is acceptable, when in fact the court decided it was not.

    I could go on at greater length, as this man’s catalog of errors is a very full one. Anyone who trusts his opinion is taking a risk equivalent to coating themselves in chicken fat and jumping into a pond full of hungry alligators.

    We hope that the penny has finally dropped – that so long as Wirz, the Home Office, and indeed anyone from Northumbria police has anything to do with the NWEF, it is not a place to be seen if you value your professional reputation.

  • 2017-08-30 at 5:42 am
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    I wonder what was on the agenda, I notice the responses managed to avoid answering that, unless there weren’t any, and they were just going to make it up as they went along, actually, that probably makes more sense.

  • 2017-08-30 at 12:15 am
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    Well, well! Poor old Nicky Wirz. He has always managed to continue spouting rubbish about the IOD review process despite losing court cases left, right and centre.

    But it appears that Forces aren’t as bothered about listening to his ramblings now. They must finally realise that by lying down with a dog, they have risen with fleas.

    With no audience he may stop telling lies about reviews which means the IODPA won’t have to tell the truth about him.

    Win, win!!

  • 2017-08-29 at 8:17 pm
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    The truth is out there, or should I say legally contained within the regulations, maybe the HR folk and misguided doctors have started to realise that the tide is turning.

Comments are closed.

This group of police force HR managers, occupational health personnel and the odd force solicitor is supposedly concerned in its quarterly meetings with keeping the police workforce fit and well. The clue is in the name - it is supposed to concentrate on people who work. However, it spends time also considering matters relating to disabled former officers. Quite what legitimates this group's interest in disabled private citizens who are in receipt of a police injury pension is a mystery.

The mystery deepens when it is revealed that the Home Office and representatives of the commercial company which has the contract to run Police Medical Appeal Boards, HML, also regularly appear on the list of delegates. The mystery morphs into something smelling of conspiracy when the delegate list is entirely absent of any representative of any of the people whose lives the NAMF seeks to affect. There is nobody from the Police Federation, nor from NARPO, nor anyone from any disablement charity, mental health association, etc. etc. In other words, the NAMF is a one-sided talking shop. Even at that level it is not properly representative of all police forces, for we note that there are rarely, if ever, delegates present from every area.

Those of us with long memories, recollect that the Home Office claimed that it had conducted what it called a 'survey' of all forces, way back in 2004, prior to finalising its unlawful guidance issued as Annex C to HO circular 46/2004. The HO claimed that their survey showed that it was common practice for forces to review the degree of disablement of injury-on-duty pensioners once they reached what would have been normal force retirement age. This is what the guidance said:

'This Guidance is being issued to help ensure a fairer, more cohesive approach to the payment of injury benefits to ill-health retired officers who have reached the compulsory retirement age with their Force. A recent survey found that practice in this area was diverse. Some forces automatically reduced degree of disablement benefits to the lowest banding when this age had been reached - others continued to pay benefits at the same rate until the death of the Officer concerned.'

The plain truth, revealed through Freedom of Information Act requests, was that there never was any survey. The HO later tried to claim that the bold, unmistakable claim made in its guidance resulted from 'round the table discussions' at meetings of the NAMF. Yet nothing even hinting at such discussions appeared in the minutes and the HO could not produce a single scrap of data nor any record or any other evidence to show quite how it had come to the conclusion that some forces automatically reduced benefits to the lowest band at what would have been normal force retirement age.

Shockingly, further research revealed that absolutely no forces, not a single one out of the 43 in England and Wales, had ever reduced benefits to the lowest band at what would have been normal force retirement age, automatically or otherwise. The Home Office was caught out in a blatant lie. It was a lie intended for one purpose only - its actually intent was to give an air of normalcy to the huge change in practice which the HO wished to bring about.

This astounding act by a Government department tells us what the NAMF was then, and remains now. It's objective in so far as police injury on duty pensions is concerned, is to subvert the law of the land. The law cannot be changed retrospectively, so the inner circle work to find ways to unlawfully manipulate it through influencing gullible HR managers, and by training carefully selected corruptible SMPs how to refuse grant of an injury award and how to conduct reviews which reduce the degree of disablement of retired officers.

And so the machinations of the NAMF continue...