Chief Constable

Merseyside’s Hatchet Man

iodpa Chief Constable, police injury award, Regulation 37, Review, selected medical practitioner
Merseyside’s Hatchet Man

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my lords, that where laws end, tyranny begins.

William Pitt – Case of Wilkes. Speech (January 9, 1770)

A hatchet man is a person employed to carry out controversial or disagreeable tasks, such as the dismissal of a number of people from employment. Merseyside Police employ a hatchet man with the grand title of Medical Retirement Officer (MRO) whose role is more sinister and which adversely affects vulnerable disabled officers and former officers.

His task is to prioritise maximum savings to the force budget, ‘through the robust investigation of injury award applications, appeals and reviews‘.

We quote above from his job description. This is what the man is hired to do.  Not placed there to help injured and distressed people obtain their lawful rights, but to ‘investigate’ them with the objective of reducing the amount of money which would otherwise be paid them by way of recompense for injuries incurred in the line of duty.

There is only one way to read the intention behind the role of MRO. It is a perversion of what the Regulations governing injury on duty pensions were intended to achieve. We fully accept that no public money should be awarded without due diligence. All well and good if ‘robust’ was taken to mean that great care should be taken to comply with the Regulations, but we see that in Merseyside they believe that ‘robust’ means doing whatever they think they can get away with to deny injured officers and former officers their rights.

What Merseyside’s MRO is doing is unlawful. And it is shameful.

We in IODPA are not naïve.  We understand all too well that there has to be some form of administrative procedure regarding Injury Awards which requires management by a functionary of some sort.  That being said, the functionary needs to be neutral with no set agenda other than the lawful application of the statutory duties imposed upon the organisation by the Regulations.

We are, frankly, appalled to see that the job description of the Medical Retirement Officer ignores this principle and imposes an agenda upon the position which prioritises the needs of the organisation over the rights of the recipient. The job description includes sentences such as:

[. . . ] ensure that any changes to pension payments are implemented and financial savings made where appropriate.

There should be no thought given by the Medical Retirement Officer as to the financial consequences on the force of helping to ensure the Regulations are applied lawfully. His role is an abuse of the scope and purpose of the Regulations.

When we see that the Medical Retirement Officer’s main objective is to save money for the Chief Constable it becomes clear that he can not possibly be acting lawfully.

We know, for example, that he takes it upon himself to decide whether any applicant for an injury award application is seen by the selected medical practitioner (SMP) or not.

On behalf of the Police Pension Authority, who is in farcical fact, not an impartial body, but is none other than the Chief Constable wearing a different hat, the MRO blithely breaches the Data Protection Act by forensic examination of the confidential medical records and reports of individuals.

No wonder the Chief Constable of Merseyside finds it hard to arrange for the Regulations to be administered lawfully. He is under pressure to reduce spending, and police injury pensions consume a significant part of his budget. But, that is a pill he just has to swallow. He is under a legal obligation to administer the Regulations properly. He is not entitled to look upon them as an expense which can be trimmed.

I refer the Chief Constable to the case of The Police Federation of England and Wales v. The Secretary for the Home Department (Neutral Citation Number: [2009] EWHC 488 (Admin) Case No: CO/7612/2008). This case concerned the date when new commutation factors for police pensions were brought into law.

Justice Cox stated:

‘The Home Secretary’s undoubted interest in the expenditure of police authorities does not in my view enable her to alter those rights and liabilities which arise under the Regulations.’

And:

‘Affordability and public expenditure implications are therefore, in my judgment, irrelevant.’

It is not within the remit of any Chief Constable to direct an employee to save money by means of unlawful manipulation the Regulations. It is an abuse of his authority to specify in a job description that the MRO must approach his task with the objective of making financial savings. The over-riding intention of the Regulations is that people should be paid at the level which is appropriate to the individual circumstances. There is ample mechanism within the Regulations to ensure that this is achieved. Nobody should receive more that their due, and nobody should receive less than their due.

Merseyside has deliberately set out to ensure that the latter situation is the norm.

The MRO decides regulation 37 reviews without the benefit of any input from the SMP. He decides who has experienced a substantial alteration in degree of disablement, and who has not – and does this, not on the basis of medical evidence, but on whether the individual has increased earnings or not. He operates a rule of thumb, whereby if someone has seen an increase of over 10% in their earnings then, ipso facto, they must have had a substantial alteration in degree of disablement.

This is what he instructs former officers who are on an injury pension:

‘. . .  if you commence work or if you are currently working and your gross salary increases by over 10% you are required to inform this department as soon as practicable.’

We have to comment that the MRO has no authority whatever to ‘require’ any private citizen to inform him of a salary increase. Moreover, we feel like shouting at the MRO that a pay increase does not in any way signify that there will have been a substantial alteration in degree of disablement.

What the MRO is doing is creating an iron link between wages and disablement, when, under the Regulations, no such link exists. Disabled former officers are free to earn whatever they can, and their employers are entitled to give them a pay rise if they wish. A pay rise can have no possible link with the level of an individual’s degree of disablement. The MRO is using this as a means of reviewing degree of disablement, as an excuse for holding a review with no good reason, and as justification for reducing the level of pension paid.

Merseyside have corrupted the purpose of the Regulations and turned its provisions on their head for the sole purpose of ensuring that disabled former officers are robbed of their correct level of injury pension payment. The medical basis of assessment of degree of disablement has been abandoned in favour of an actuarial exercise where the cost exposure to the force is the bottom line.

While any question under the Police Injury Benefit Regulations is medical by nature and always requires the opinion of a SMP, in Merseyside the SMP seemingly does not make the decisions. The SMP acts only as a rubber stamp for the pre-made determination of the Medical Retirement Officer.  The Medical Retirement Officer is like an injury award hitman-by-proxy, getting paid to maximise cost savings for the Chief Constable, with no fear of any comeback.

Disabled former officers and serving officers seeking an injury award are kept in the dark. It seems very successfully, for few of them have the knowledge required to realise that they are being ripped off. Many of them are in no fit state to raise a query, and thus accept the decisions conveyed to them with no realisation that the decisions have been unlawfully arrived at. Put simply, they trust their force to do the right thing by them when injured on duty to the extent that they can no longer perform the ordinary duties of a police officer.

Clearly, that trust is sadly misplaced. There are some 880 former officers from Merseyside Police who are paid an injury pension. They need to wake up to the fact that they have, in all probability, been denied their proper pension rights.

Of course, a few individuals do raise queries with the MRO. They question his decisions. Some even manage to take matters to appeal via a Police Medical Appeal Board. Merseyside plays the numbers game. A deliberate calculation has been made, which concludes that those few individuals who do request an appeal to a Police Medical Appeal Board are far outnumbered by the majority who have no idea that they are being denied their rights.

The Medical Retirement Officer makes the decisions but never has to face the consequences. He never has to account for or justify his actions, as he is not the one who would have to be listed as the respondent at a PMAB, or at a judicial review.

The French have a term for such a position: éminence grise (French: “grey eminence”), a powerful advisor or decision-maker who operates secretly or otherwise unofficially.  An apt English phrase is ‘the power behind the throne’, someone who does not have the ultimate official position in a government or organization but who secretly controls it.

The Medical Retirement Officer is not a qualified medical authority – but is deciding what are essentially medical matters. He is making decisions for the Police Pension Authority, and we question whether he has the delegated power to do so. The Chief Constable has already delegated the day-to-day operation of his role as PPA to the head or director of Human Resources. Delegata potestas non potest delegari is Latin for a constitutional and administrative law, translated as, ‘no delegated powers can be further delegated’ and may well apply here.

According to Merseyside, a Medical Retirement Officer as well as having the skills to save the force money should also have:

‘A good knowledge of investigative procedures [. . . ].  Knowledge and understanding of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act with regards to surveillance and investigation of officers and pensioners believed to be falsely claiming compensation.’

Not only shall the Medical Retirement Officer have the principle duty to reduce financial costs to the expense of those injured on duty, but he is also let loose with RIPA.

Judicial approval should be the norm, not the exception, for placing members of the public under surveillance and public authorities should be compelled to report how and why they are spying on disabled persons by abusing powers that were introduced to protect us from terrorism and serious crime.

There is no room for RIPA in the administration and lawful application of the Police Injury Benefit Regulations.  Medical evidence is paramount. If the PPA has any cause to think that any individual is working the system, the regulation 37 allows for a formal review of the degree of disablement. The individual can be medically assessed by a duly qualified medical practitioner, selected by the PPA.

The SMP alone should make an assessment, and a decision, and once made that decision is final. Should there be any attempt to exaggerate one’s medical disability a qualified clinician should have little difficulty in spotting it.  If  fraud is suspected then this would be a matter for a serious criminal investigation and prosecution.  It is not open to a Medical Retirement Officer to use RIPA as a means to maximise the financial savings to benefit the force budget.

An injury award is not a benefit that has to be reapplied for – it is an entitlement for life and is final once the high bar of the initial grant has been attained.

Is all the above too hard to believe? Can you bring yourself to realise that a police force, whose job it is to prevent crime, could allow disabled former officers to be put at the mercy of a MRO whose objective is to unlawfully reduce their pensions, and to do whatever it takes to prevent injured serving officers being granted an injury award?

Here is the job description of Merseyside Police’s Medical Retirement Officer  as obtained in a recent Freedom of Information act request.

This job description shows all that is wrong with the way Merseyside, and some other forces, are administering injury awards.  The glib references to following Home Office guidance is a poor attempt of virtue signalling – making a statement that blithely mentions the requirement to ‘follow guidance’ because it thinks it sounds right and it will garner approval, rather than because anyone will actually believe it.  This job description was created in February 2015.  The Home Office partially withdrew their central guidance for injury reviews in March 2012 and then completely in February 2014.  There is no Home Office guidance to follow.

Instead, the Home Office now prefers to keep away from the misdeeds of Chief Constables and their hatchet men. The Home Office now says,

‘We would advise, in the event that such reviews are being conducted or considered, that police authorities should satisfy themselves that they are acting in accordance with the regulations and the relevant case law in the light of the decision in Simpson.’

IODPA suggest that the Chief Constable of Merseyside take a long hard look at what has been done, and continues to be done in his name by the Medical Retirement Officer. If the Chief Constable fails to act then our suspicion, that every breach of the Regulations committed by the MRO is done with his approval and encouragement, will be justified.

There are 880 individuals retired from Merseyside who receive an injury pension. There needs to be conducted and independent and scrupulously fair and impartial appraisal of how each and every one of their injury pensions have been administered.

 

Eggs

iodpa Chief Constable, College of Policing
Eggs

‘Put all your eggs in one basket and you get a basket full of rotten eggs’

(Anon)

 

With acknowledgements to P. G. Wodehouse.

“I say, Jeeves! This egg smells rather whiffy,” said Bertie, wrinkling his nose in a way which the delightful Hermione Berkley-Houndstooth, current object of his affections, had admitted she found desperately appealing.

Jeeves paused momentarily from his accustomed daily task of ironing the morning edition of The Middleshire Racing Bugle to comment wryly, ‘In my experience sir, if something smells whiffy, then it is indeed usually whiffy. Perhaps you might care to refrain from consuming that particular egg sir.’

“Spot on, Jeeves. I say, you are a dashed clever fellow. What would a chap do without you, what?”

“Shall I select another egg for your consumption sir?” enquired the redoubtable Jeeves.

“Not bally likely, Jeeves old snort. Once whiffed, once shy, and that sort of thing. Chuck ’em all in the jolly old bin and toddle out and get some fresh ones, there’s a good chap.”

Jeeves sighed inaudibly, and put down the iron.

“And, Jeeves, when you toddle, be sure to toddle in a novel direction and obtain the said eggs from a different merchant.”

“Very good sir. Discretion would seem to dictate the wisdom of using a different purveyor, but I regret to venture that the results may be no different.”

 

 

Here at IODPA HQ we know a lot about rotten eggs, having seen them in the form of various HR managers, bean-counters and SMPs.

There is not much good to be said about a rotten egg. Once rotten, they tend to stay rotten. Their only saving grace is that they are scattered, thankfully fairly thinly at present, throughout the 43 police forces of England and Wales.

Police forces are so numerous because a wise Government, in the days when Government actually was wise, decided that policing was a local job to be done by local citizens, responsible only to the Crown, the law of the land, and the local elected members of the police authority.

Police injury pensions are the law of the land – they are the same for each force – but the administration of these pensions is in the hands, and at the mercy of, local administrators. Due to a change in the law, police authorities, who nominally at least were supposed to exercise some oversight and discretion have been disbanded, and all matters concerning injury pensions have been handed to a new office. Namely, the police pension authority.

Who, jaw-droppingly, is now the Chief Constable of each force. (Other than the City of London)

A moment’s pause for thought brings the name Robert Maxwell to mind. You may well remember that he was the disgraced media proprietor and one-time Member of Parliament, who used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds to shore up the shares of the Mirror Group, intending to save his companies from bankruptcy.

Chief Constables have been taking a leaf from Maxwell’s book, and have been hungrily eyeing-up the sums of money they have to fork out from their budgets to pay the pensions of former officers who were permanently disabled in the line of duty. They see this money, not as just recompense for injury, but as a potential way of meeting the demands to trim their spending and to deliver more efficient policing.

Instead of selling off luxury cars fitted with discrete blue lights as a tax dodge and bunged to civilians to swan around in. Instead of culling the wasted hours and expense of membership of the largely useless private limited company which is the Association of Chief Constables. Instead of joining together to all buy standard computer systems which allows each force to more easily deal with crime. Instead of using combined purchasing power to secure a lower price on everything from uniforms, equipment and vehicles, to services such as accountancy and public relations, they have targeted the pensions of disabled folk.

“Wait a moment!” I hear the cry from some forces, ‘We are looking to make savings across the board, and injury pensions are just a part of the exercise.”

Sorry, Chiefs, but that just does not wash.

You have come upon this from entirely the wrong direction. IODPA accepts that no person should receive a higher rate of injury pension than appropriate. We also, and we may surprise you here, actually agree that the provision to hold reviews of degree of disablement – at appropriate intervals – is a sensible and necessary provision of the Regulations. You, Chiefs, however, think that all injury pensions are fair game, and that by devious and unlawful manipulations of reviews of degree of disablement your tame HR managers and SMPs will achieve reductions.

Your approach is wrong on all levels. Not least morally, and certainly financially. Parliament, representing the will, and blessing of the people, agreed that officers injured in the line of duty so badly that they could no longer perform the ordinary duties of a constable could be pensioned off. The pension was to be paid at a level which reflected each individual’s loss of capacity to work, and thus earn.

You, Chiefs, see fit to dishonour the sacrifices of the men and women who gave up their health whilst doing a job which is acknowledged as dangerous.

The fact is, Chiefs, that you have taken your eye off the ball. You have been listening to the warped whisperings of the bean-counters and the HR managers. The bean-counters know little, and care less, about injured officers. HR managers know nothing and care nothing about the Regulations which govern injury awards. They, at least, have excuses of misplaced objectives and ignorance.

You, Chiefs, have no such excuses.

We in IODPA hear that some nasty little twerps who frequent the meetings of the National Attendance Management Forum have been lobbying, on the grounds of cost-saving and rationalisation, that all services and administration of police injury pensions should be placed in the hands of a commercial company.

The arguments for this, which you will no doubt be asked to consider, mask the real intentions of the twerps. What they want to achieve is centralised control, by elements within the Home Office or their nominees, of the selection and training of the ”duly qualified medical practitioners’ who will be tasked with conducting their part in the reviews of individual’s degree of disablement. The twerps want to see SMPs become nothing more than the tools of a for-profit company. The twerps want to see degree of disablement calculated not by reference to medical condition, but to a theoretical figure derived by comparing theoretical wages. The twerps also want to see all injury pensions reviewed on a regular basis, regardless of the absence of any evidence of change in circumstances. The twerps, Chiefs, are doing a Maxwell.

We in IODPA say to you, Chiefs, clean up your HR Departments and sack the incompetent or train the ill-trained. You will save money as a result. Do not listen to your ignorant bean-counters and HR managers who have no concept of the reason, or true value, for there being in place a pension scheme for officers injured in the line of duty. Do not for a moment be fooled by these pygmies into thinking that a centralised administration of injury pensions will save your force money. It will not.

What will result is all the rotten eggs being put in one basket.

And that will create such a stink that you will never be rid of it.

The Disgrace is National

iodpa Chief Constable
The Disgrace is National

control

“Divide and rule, the politician cries;
Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedichte

An objective reader might assume that many of the posts on this blog are Bristol-centric.  There is no doubt that Avon & Somerset wins the prize for most maladministration at the moment, but this should not deflect attention from other Police Pension Authorities, some of whom who are keeping their powder dry, ready to  attack their own IOD pensioners once they think the coast is clear. Also let’s not forget the individual battles some IODs are fighting, and have been for many years, against forces that have never been dormant in their abuse of the Regulations.

The posts and pages on site are of concern to every IOD pensioner, and to serving officers too, as they touch all areas of the Regulations irrespective of those abusing them.

IODPA has heard of the shameful actions of some forces who deliberate target the same individuals repeatedly, and of the cases decided by the Pension Ombudsman in the IOD’s favour only for the forces concerned to repeat the maladministration. We have noted well the use by some forces of a particular couple of SMPs who have the distinction of managing to combine shameful ignorance of the Regulations with obvious disregard of the ethics of their profession, and who are nothing less than hired guns whose purpose is solely to reduce injury pension payments.

It is a disgrace that disabled former officers are being compelled to spend the twilight of their lives fighting continuous legal battles to just keep the injury pension they are entitled to after being injured on duty. Like all of us, they never gave much thought to the possibility or consequences of injury, and certainly never in their wildest nightmares anticipated that they would face determined attempts by corrupt and spiteful administrators to unlawfully reduce their pension entitlements

We have heard some of the stories of individuals, but we also need to hear about systematic institutional abuses.  Isolated victimisation is the weapon of choice by some HR managers and legal services – divide and conquer.  But when all these narratives are viewed as a whole, the picture changes to that of misfeasance in a public office – an offence at common law triable only on indictment. It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The tort of Misfeasance in Public Office was designed to target ‘the deliberate and dishonest abuse of power’ in the event of a person suffering loss or damage as a result of administrative action known to be unlawful or carried out with reckless disregard or indifference to the consequences.

The offence of ‘Malfeasance’ takes the reckless element a stage further and is when a public official intentionally does something either legally or morally wrong which he had no right to do. It always involves dishonesty, illegality, or knowingly exceeding authority for improper reasons. It is conduct in violation of the law.

Here is an example of how those administrating injury awards think:

appeals

…as of now I believe Carole and I are clear about what to do.  They’ll be an awful lot of appeals though.

Yes, you read it right.  They heard that the Home Office guidance was withdrawn in full but they plan to continue with their ‘plan’ anyway.

They know their actions are unlawful as they fully expect appeals.  Why would they expect appeals if they were doing the right thing?  Obviously they know their continued actions are illegal – but still they go on.

But this appalling behaviour isn’t confined to those at Portishead (A&S’s HQ) – similar emails exposing maladministration exist in numerous police forces throughout the country.  Dr Bulpitt, the author of the above email, used to be the force medical officer (FMA) of Cambridgeshire.  Before Bulpitt became the FMA he was the director of Premier Occupational Healthcare Limited (again there’s another story here with how the director of the contractor eventually became the substantive FMA of the client).  Under his stewardship this company provided a SMP by the name of Dr Roberts to Cambs.  This force then fanatically, zealously and unlawfully set out to place all those receiving a band four pension, and who were over 65 years of age, onto a band one. Every single one of these IODs eventually had their rightful band restored. But the people who abused the Regulations and foisted such distress on vulnerable disabled former officers never suffered any censure or punishment.

Bulpitt’s Chief Constable around this time was a former A&S senior officer named Julie Spence.  This Chief Constable’s extraordinary claim was that the guidance in HOC 46/2004 was mandatory.  In March 2010 she announced her retirement following repeated challenges over her claim and a matter of days after the Home Office advised all forces to suspend reviews – a clear signal of admission that the guidance she insisted was ‘mandatory’ was in fact unlawful. Julie Spence was an accomplished self-publicist, and was undoubtedly ambitious. She had even chosen to suggest, to a reporter from the Guardian newspaper in November 2008, that she might be interested in being considered for selection to the post of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Instead, at the age of 54 she decided to quit policing in order, as reported, ‘to spend more time with her husband, John’.

We may never hear the full truth behind her departure, but the evidence we have seen may shed some light on her very individual approach to the Home Office Guidance. You might care to bear in mind that Julie Spence has a law degree, which would lead one to presume she should have known full well the true status of Home Office guidance, and if she was in any doubt about the status of HO guidance she had a telephone on her desk which she could have used to call the HO for clarification. Perhaps she did make that call? And perhaps she received encouragement and offers of support for her extra-regulatory adventure.

Isn’t it indicative of the web of corruption at senior levels that Bulpitt, who was at the heart of Spence’s unlawful attack on injury pensions, was still, in 2014, writing inflammatory emails, and is still  allowed to be employed today, when his main raison d’être seems to be to manipulate SMP Johnson into breaking the law?

All these degrees of separation are being diligently joined up.

We intend to collate a true census of the abuses and then make the transgression public knowledge. If you think your battle with your former force is isolated local malfeasance, think again.  From our experience, confirmed by a recent shot-in-foot survey by the College of Policing, there is widespread ignorance, incompetence, indifference, lack of training and underfunding of injury pension administration. Add to that the morally reprehensible attitudes and actions of the likes of Bulpitt, Wirz, Broome, Kern, Johnson, Cheng and others, we should not wonder there are so many instances of unlawful application of the Regulations. It is a sobering thought that there is more than likely an IOD living within a short distance from you who is a victim of pension injustice.

Please email admin@iodpa.org with your news and anything you want given a public platform concerning your force.

Misconceptions

iodpa Chief Constable, morale
Misconceptions
“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, “What else could this mean?”
Shannon L. Alder― Shannon L. Alder
— 

This group has asked what this all ‘means‘ continually. Why are we putting so much effort in broadcasting the failings of a police service we served.  The answer: A&S has attempted to shamefullly bully former officers with their unlawful agenda to reduce their duty to pay injury pensions.  What other interpretation can be placed on the events of the past two years?

IODPA is thankful for our source within Avon & Somerset who informs us that the force thinks that we as a group are misinformed.  It transpires that the force thinks we are confused and that all the questions we ask to justify the position of the force are only asked to reaffirm our ‘misconceived’ view that the force is unlawfully seeking to reduce  injury on duty awards. The spin A&S presents is that it is a force for good (excuse the pun), continually acting in the best interests of those that it has medically retired (as if).

So this blog post needs to set the record straight and state that no matter how much spin the force tries to pass the buck, it is in fact it itself that has the misconception, IODPA is not against regulation 37.  Reviews are a necessary mechanism and important as the regulations are forbidden to speculate on the degree of disablement.  The Scoffield report summarises the position of IODPA when it comes to the invocation of regulation 37, so there is no need to repeat this group’s position in this blog post. A&S can not rewrite history.

The letter from Mountstevens;  the minutes from finance meetings; correspondence from the HR managers; the email from the PCC’s finance officer Mark Simmonds; the make believe threat of prosecution under a law that does not exist if a questionnaire is not filled in to their satisfaction; the selection of 16 of the youngest and highest IOD band  – a group that still have not had closure 18 months later; the communication between Johnson and Bulpitt where these 2 doctors discuss revisiting causation and reapplying apportionment. IODPA does not need to alter the facts to fit our narrative.

The force is the organisation that has attempted via subterfuge and duplicity to present their own spin. We just tell it how it is.

The interesting piece of information given to this association through our friendly person on the inside is the time and resources the force has spent monitoring and logging social media in an attempt to infiltrate and undermine IODPA.  In a way this group is flattered that a police service with stretched resources is willing to draft personnel from their usual tasks to take on a group of retired former officers. Who needs to catch criminals when the force can spend it’s time on facebook monitoring the ‘likes’ of those it has retired?

It is not ourselves who have the misconception.  We served with this force.  We know all too well the pits it is willing to drop into to defend its position. Even when it knows it is on the wrong side of the fight it just entrenches itself further.

We can see history repeating in the way things are playing out in the current news stories involving the saga of the chief officers. Yet another brave serving officer speaks out the truth.

THE FEAR OF REPERCUSSIONS:
Hi Bullshire Polfed, Please will you post the below for me. As a serving female police officer with Avon and Somerset Constabulary, I agree with everything said by PC B Standard in his letter to you on 30th July 2015. I too have so much I could say but have been warned if I do I will be breaching our Codes of Conduct by bringing the force into disrepute. I have personally witnessed the vile attacks on frontline colleagues by senior ranks of A&S. I have also tried to support them after the event.Bullying is rife within A&S and the Grievance Procedure so underhand that no one has any faith in it. My colleagues are too frightened to approach the federation for help, as they fear repercussions from making a formal complainant in confidence.
Officers are suffering high levels of stress and in some cases finding life not worth living when they speak out against bullying and being punished
As a female officer will I report any inappropriate conduct / sexism from male colleagues??? Not if they have any rank I won’t! If our chief constable can get away with it why not anyone else. It appals me to think those poor women that spoke out now have to work alongside Nick Gargan again. It wouldn’t surprise me if they felt the need to leave.
Tow the line or find another job is the message we are receiving. Loud and Clear SMT, loud and clear! Regards,
PC V Concerned

— 

How long is it before the force’s management is put on special measures?

It would not be surprising if the paper shredders at Portishead will be red hot and in overdrive – there is a lot of covering-up that needs covering-up –  just as the trouble shooters from the Home Office are driving along the M4 corridor to take on the huge task to start the reorganisation of a  police service that has lost it’s way.

Open Letters to Those in Power

iodpa Chief Constable
Open Letters to Those in Power

“Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”
Theodore Roosevelt― Theodore Roosevelt

A brave serving officer has opened his heart, risked the vilification, wrath and bullying of Avon & Somerset’s chief officers, and told the truth about what it is to be a PC in the constabulary. The same constabulary that targets its retired officers on IODs in the same manner it abuses its serving ones.
https://www.facebook.com/bullshirepolicefederation/posts/859634284118913:0

A FORCE FOR GOOD_ A serving police officer..

The twitter response from DCC Gareth Morgan  suggested he doesn’t recognise the picture ‘PC B Standard’ paints (hardly surprising as the DCC types his twitter feed whilst sitting in his ivory tower) and to cheerfully put forward a gleeful invite to meet up ‘in a place of PC Standard’s choosing’

Notwithstanding if PC ‘Standard’ ever takes the DCC up on his invite that his career will be over (an interesting statistic would be how many serving officers in A&S are off on long term sick due to management bullying induced stress), it is the lack of prescient of the DCC that he himself can not see that he and his chief officer colleagues are the problem cause.

It seems this force preys on serving officers just the same as it sucks the life force from those that it has retired.

DCC Morgan – you say you don’t recognise the description, but the 490 people retired on an IOD recognise it all too well.

Here is an accompanying polemic  to PC B Standard’s brave stand.

A FORCE FOR EVIL?

When I was told that I  would  be retired on an injury pension I thought the force had my best interests in heart.  I  didn’t understand the regulations – I’d never read or even heard of them.  I just thought this was what a happened when you could no longer work as an operational police officer.  I tried to get on with my life, and the constabulary seemingly stepped away and gave me space as I never heard from them for years.

Then I came across the Mountsteven’s letter that compared the expense of fulfilling the force’s duty to pay injury pensions to replacing the fleet of police vehicles.  I then found other IODs similarly shocked and then the reviews of others started.  Reviews motivated by greed  Reviews not individual to the circumstances of the retired officer.  Reviews initiated with the tacit approval of the force’s chief officers.

It became clear that we had not been reviewed because the force was allowing us to rebuild our lives – we were never reviewed as it suited them not to review.  They hadn’t left us alone by any notion of displaying kindness and concern, they had left us alone because they had forgotten, and it had suited them to forget.

The force cannot proclaim they have a duty to review when they themselves have never reviewed.  A suitable interval isn’t ‘their‘ suitable ‘we have no money‘ interval.  It is an interval suitable to the individual.

But it is the falsity, the subterfuge and treacherous guile that the force engages against those who dare speak out against it .  PC Standard shows the true colours of those in charge at A&S.  If current officers are being told mistruths to lure them into a false way of thinking as PC Standard put it ‘they are to sell the lies that all is well to the officers on the ground’, it is nothing compared to when the force sees you as an enemy to be crushed.  The freedom of information team have been told by the chief officers to breach the act by giving false answers and to claim subjects are vexatious and therefore out-of-bounds.  Never do they think if they told the truth to start with then no-one would seek disclosure of the real truth through freedom of information.  It is the lies that need to be unmasked

And the duplicity continues.  Under instruction from higher powers the HR managers do not tell the federation nor narpo the truth.  Letters to the Temporary Chief Constable go unanswered.  Internal Dispute Resolution Procedures go ignored.  Any communication asking for updates and answers go to the black hole of Legal Services.  Concerns raised by Members of Parliament are bounced back with glib half-truths that do not match and therefore blatantly contradict the letters and emails given to the IODs that are being reviewed – vapid answers to the MPs given purely with the intent to throw the enquirer off the scent and to get them off their back.

A&S chief officers run a police service and the bar is set high for professional standards. If the police service fails to be ethically and morally sound in the decisions of it’s leaders then it loses it’s position of authority on all counts.

Misconduct of an individual is one thing – a culture of lying and masking the truth is group think.  Endemic to A&S HQ.  This group think has infected and poisoned Portishead HQ.

PC Standard wrote

“Their tactics work. I’m typing this, nervous that I should ever be found out. If they ever found out who I was I would be shown the door via a reg 15 for gross misconduct for bringing the force into disrepute, my reputation destroyed and vilified for being a trouble maker

That is exactly how those with an A&S IOD feel.  Magnified due to the vulnerability of being disabled.

How can this scandal hit force be allowed to continue with its current leaders?  It is no coincidence that the current abuse of IODs is simultaneously occurring with all the other  morally and legally wrong  decisions of A&S.

It is how this force rolls …

So yes, DCC Morgan, it seems you and your close friends are the only ones that don’t know.

Apologies to Taylor Swift for the following misquote

“If you’re horrible to me, I’m going to write a song blog about it, and you won’t like it. That’s how I operate.”
― Taylor Swift

Patient Zero

iodpa caselaw, Chief Constable
Patient Zero
ACPO colluded with the Home Office to introduce unlawful procedures
into injury pension reviews. We present the evidence

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”
― Jim Butcher, Vignette

IODPA has often referred to Home Office circular 46/2004 as being the start of the rot and the beginning of the end for justice in applying the injury Regulations in the manner they were intended.  We have laid the blame mostly on ‘The Bureaucratium’ of the civil servants’ desire to save the ‘public purse’ by trampling on the rights of disabled former officers. The following years clearly evidenced that the more massive a ‘Bureaucratium’ becomes; it only becomes less caring and more potent.

Elements within the Home Office had built up their own sense of importance to such an extent that they saw nothing wrong in encouraging police authorities and chief officers to trample on the Regulations.  The rampage initiated by HOC 46/2004 was only brought to an end by the few brave individuals who took their individual cases to judicial review and the Pension Ombudsman.

But what if we say that it wasn’t just the Home Office that got us into this mess?  Of course, they lit the fuse.  But who provided the match?

Would you be surprised to hear it was a group of people who once held the office of constable themselves?   Back in the day, before they reached their halcyon career heights, these people could have been injured on duty.  So who were these monkeys to the Home Office’s organ grinder?

ACPO!

The HO asked ACPO for its feedback on the draft of what was to become Annex C to HO circular 46/2004. The Chief Constable of Staffordshire, John Giffard, replied for ACPO. He was the designated lead for ACPO on police pensions. He spoke for all Chief Officers when he told the Home Office:

‘I suspect that my original intention was always to deal with people reaching 65 years of age and that remains the most important part. We continue to think that at that stage anybody in receipt of an injury award should be automatically dropped to the lowest band or possibly even completely dropped.’
You may think it remarkable that such a group of very senior police officers would not understand that the Regulations do not allow an injury award to be ‘automatically dropped’ or ceased, as he suggests. One possibility is that they understood perfectly well, but were prepared to sell IOD pensioners down the river, as the HO appeared to be willing to support a raid on injury pensions.In 2004 this could have all been stopped.  
–
The dubious practice of manipulating the injury pension Regulations so as to attempt to save money could have been blocked, scuppered before it gathered any momentum. Instead, due in no small part to the ready acquiescence of ACPO, we have seen the rise and spread of corrupt practices where the purpose and intent of the Regulations are disregarded, to the very great detriment of both serving and retired officers.
–
This is what the Home Office wrote to John Giffard CBE QPM, aforementioned Chief Constable Staffordshire Police, asking for his views concerning the proposed new method of reviewing and thus reducing injury pensions of those reaching 65 years of age.

HO-2004

HO letter to CC John Giffard

Giffard should have replied, “Not on my life.  You are not allowed to do this  – the Regulations forbid it”.  But no. He gave  the Home Office ACPO’s rubber stamp of approval, and even went further. According to Giffard’s outrageous view, expressed on behalf of all Chief Officers across the land, injury pensions should actually be ceased at that age. He was not talking about some future, revision of Regulations, some new diminished injury pension provision. He was talking about subverting the current Regulations.

JG-HO-2004

Reply from CC John Giffard to HO

The line about “expecting, but not concerned with” a challenge from the Staff Associations is a nice touch and tells us something more about the moral bankruptcy of the man and of the organisation he represented. He obviously realised the significance of what he was suggesting but coolly calculated the Federation would be baffled and too impotent to do anything about the planned pension raid.

ACPO were quite willing to throw injured former officers to the wolves and to let the survivors do what they could to  rescue their pension rights by challenging maladministration at judicial review. Instead of supporting and protecting former officers – and serving officers, for they too might become injured on duty and have to retire on a pension – ACPO deliberately chose to side with the Home Office and agree to what it may well have realised was an unlawful abuse of the law.

I will conclude this eye-opening account of the duplicity of one Chief Constable, acting on behalf of all his peers, with the sobering reminder that all Chief Constables are now the Police Pension Authorities.  They have responsibility for the administration of the injury pension scheme.  Frightening isn’t it?  Having this fox in the police pension hen-house set-up is no different from trusting the organ grinder’s monkey to guard the money instead of spending it on bananas.

Who will watch the watchers?

iodpa Chief Constable, Pension Ombudsman
Who will watch the watchers?

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – Who will watch the watchers?”

Juvenal― Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires
 
 —
—

Police Pension Authorities (PPA) have the administrative power and control of the implementation of the Police Injury Pension Regulations. They are the watchers. But some think they have more important things do, so neglect their duties in respect of the Regulations. In most forces the office of PPA is vested in the sole personage of the Chief Constable. Police injury pensioners would expect each PPA to apply their accumulated wisdom and police experience to the role. Wisdom and experience which are so very obviously lacking when the discretionary powers of a PPA are delegated, with abandonment of oversight, to lower members of staff. A rudderless ship is only a blink away from catastrophe. It is more than a mere conflict of interest if the chief financial officer or a HR manager take over the powers – it is a recipe for a disaster. Even worse should a Police and Crime Commissioner insert herself into policy making and seek to influence how the Regulations should be applied.

Whereas a PPA would normally be trusted to be fair in the application of the Regulations, when careless delegation exists the administration of injury pensions becomes twisted and corrupted; the foundation of the power itself and the authority it invokes is eroded. If a statutory power to oversee the administration of injury pensions is being abused in order to reduce the financial burden of the constabulary, then the post-holder of the power, and the power itself, are both compromised.

If the PPA is not watching, then who is watching the PPA? Who is there ready to step in when a PPA effectively walks off the bridge and lets the cook or cabin boy steer the ship? There is a fundamental flaw in handing police pension powers to the very person who stands to see their budget benefit should the Regulations be abused in order to try to save money. If the watcher is failing – who is there for the governed to turn to?  That is the crux of this post. Can the police do whatever they want, because they are the police?

No is the answer. With great power comes great responsibility (Voltaire).  The watcher is duty bound to administer injury pensions only as dictated by statute; that is the primary raison d’etre of a PPA.

In the stated case R v East Sussex County Council, Ex p Tandy [1998] AC 714, Lord Browne-Wilkinson indicated that to permit the Local Education Authority avoiding performing a statutory duty on the grounds that it prefers to spend the money in other ways would be to downgrade a statutory duty to a discretionary power.

In other words, no matter how the Chief Constable, the Director of Finance, or the Police and Crime Commissioner would rather spend ratepayers’ hard earned contributions, when it comes to police injury pensions the Police Pension Authority has an obligation first, last, and only, to the relevant pension Regulations. A Chief Constable must take off his police hat and don a different one. He must be capable of understanding that the role of PPA is distinct and different from his role as the head of the force.

But what happens if a PPA is obviously failing in its role?  Perhaps the post-holder is keeping the Captain’s seat warm whilst the true PPA is being investigated for serious misconduct allegations, and perhaps the temporary post holder has not got a grasp of what is happening on his watch.  Who can act as the guardian of the guardian and step in to resolve the maladministration and misery inflicted on disabled former officers?

It is for sure that the acting PPA has no will to stand tall and live up to the expectations of the role. What we have seen so far by Avon & Somerset is a text-book response of an inward-looking, self-serving, po-faced, morally bankrupt public organisation.  When they get things wrong the immediate reaction is to cover it up, and if challenged they resort to waffle and bluster. They never apologise, and nobody ever gets punished.

West Yorkshire Police (WYPA) is another fine example of where maladministration has flourished despite the supposedly restraining oversight of the PPA. The Pension Ombudsman (PO) has found (upheld or partly upheld) repeatedly against WYPA in the last 18 months:

Ref:PO-1407 Date:17 Apr 2014

Ref:PO-2799 Date:05 Aug 2014

Ref:PO-2301 Date:20 Mar 2015 *

Ref:PO-2705 Date:30 Mar 2015

Ref:PO-4078 Date:05 June 2015

*although not upheld by the PO this was on a technicality as the appellant had already received compensation and recompense before the decision – WYPA was still found to be guilty of maladministration

What does it take to impeach an organisation which has so many failures?  Is it the case that those retired out on injury awards have to continually ride this roller-coaster of being ‘had over’ by the PPA, turn to the PO to uphold the complaint, wait expectantly for a change in attitude and approach, only for the PPA to do it all again to others?

In a Utopia, the role of PPA would be taken from errant Chief Officers and the task handed to some other, more competent, agency to administer.

As with West Yorkshire so with Avon & Somerset: what does it take to for an external guardian to declare, ‘enough is enough’?

There are complaints pending with the Information Commissioner’s Office. There are complaints heading towards the Pensions Ombudsman. They have been questions raised with Members of Parliament. The Home secretary has been informed, the Federation knows about it, solicitors have been put on notice . . . but still Avon & Somerset pretend that they are righteous. The morals of senior management of Avon and Somerset are tainted by noble cause corruption. They have their righteous eyes on their duty to be prudent with the public purse, but fail to see that does not confer entitlement to abuse the Regulations or disabled former officers. It is sad to reflect that no-one at the insular ivory tower at Portishead thinks that keeping all those former officers in review purgatory for over a year is a bad thing.

Juvenal, an ancient Roman, satirically questioned what happens when guardians, whose job it is to enforce moral behaviour on certain women, get paid in kind to look the other way.

It is an age-old problem, so I will leave it to Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher, who also voiced concerns about the guardians, to remind us that the solution is to properly train the guardians’ souls.

Who Pays?

iodpa Chief Constable, PCC
Who Pays?

“Follow the money.  Allways follow the money”

Deepthroat.  All the President’s Men

“You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the **** it’s gonna take you”  “The Wire: Game Day (#1.9)” (2002)  Det. Lester Freamon:

There isn’t going to be too much written in this blog post.  Just the weighing of a matter.

Strange that the invoice Dr Johnson submits, under the name of his own private limited company, Sarum Occupational Health Limited,  goes to the office of Police & Crime Commissioner Mountstevens when in fact it is the Constabulary which is the Police Pension Authority. It couldn’t be the case, could it, that this huge expense wouldn’t look good on the Constabulary’s accounts, but the PCC can swallow it up in her petty cash fund. Is it simply a case of joining the dots from this letter to this invoice? :

Invoice-page-001

Finance Managers gone Rogue part 1

iodpa Chief Constable, Finance, HR, PCC
Finance Managers gone Rogue part 1

The delegated Administrator for Police pensions according to Avon & Somerset’s Joint Scheme of Governance is named as the HR Director.  The HR Director resigned suddenly in May 2014.  In mid-May 2014 the Chief Constable was suspended by Commissioner Mountstevens following allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour towards female officers and staff’.  In this organisational maelstrom, the Finance Director took on the extra duties of the HR Director in a grandly sounding re-badged dual role now called the Director of Resources.

But the authority of delegation ( the Chief Constable is the Police Pensions Authority but he is able to delegate the administration to a named other) wasn’t signed until September 2014 and with a clumsy attempt to back-date it by 3 months.  So who was steering the ship and allowed the reviews to start?  …

Letter from John Long to Julian Kern

It wasn’t on the say so of the PCC’s finance officer was it?  Nah, that’ll be just plain wrong … reviews of IOD awards should surely be solely a medical question under suitable intervals relevant to the individual.  Not because the force is broke, penniless, without means, on the’ bones of yer arse’, etc etc.