Federation

Thames Valley Police Lead The Way With Ethical Injury Reviews

Thames Valley Police Lead The Way With Ethical Injury Reviews

Thames Valley Police (‘TVP’) lead the way in how Injury on Duty reviews should be carried out and if they do indeed, follow the process as described by their National Association of Retired Police Officers Secretary (‘NARPO’), they should be applauded and praised.

We are extremely pleased to read this publication from TVP’s NARPO Secretary.  NARPO and the Federation have been involved from the outset and it appears that Reg 37(1) reviews will be conducted in exactly the way we have been campaigning for.

TVP IOD pensioners have been well represented by both organisations and we thank them wholeheartedly.

IODPA have never had a problem with reviews being held as long as they are conducted fairly, compassionately and in accordance with the Regulations and all relevant caselaw.

We are delighted that it seems that TVP are going to do just that.

Thames Valley NARPO have released a circulation explaining how the process will be carried out, how the procedure was agreed following consultation with NARPO, the Police Federation and the Force administration.

Here is the relevant section of the NARPO newsletter –

 

We commend the approach by Chief Constable Habgood (pictured above) and his team for showing the way the review process should be carried out. We are forever hopeful that other reviewing forces will take note.

If anyone is concerned at any impending reviews, please contact us at using our contact form above where we will be able to support and assist.

Update: Staffordshire Agreement

Update: Staffordshire Agreement

The Staffordshire branch of NARPO has, quite correctly, asked the Police Federation of England & Wales (PFEW) about the “agreement” that was sent out to those as a consequence of being paper reviewed almost a decade ago.  Remember this “agreement” was signed at the time by the individual, local NARPO, local PFEW and Staffordshire police.

Legal Advice March 2008 Agreement

There is a stand-out point that seems to be missed here …  The test whether the contract is a stand-alone, legally binding thing of absolute validity is arguably the wrong question to apply.  It matters not whether the contract, on it’s own, is a legal document of authority.  What matters is the context underpinning how the signed paper came into being and the legitimate expectation such a document provides as a consequence of the processes that occurred before it.

If the conclusion is flawed  (the “agreement“), then the process (a review conducted under Regulation 37) that led to that conclusion is compromised.

So the real significance lies in the gap between the very start of process (including the motivation behind why it commenced) to the finality of the Staffordshire 2008 mass review program, the conclusion of such being the “agreement“.

If the context of the “agreement” is flawed then it opens the fact that the paper review that underpins the “agreement” is unsound.

All those mass paper reviews conducted a decade ago by Staffordshire, in an attempt to limit their exposure to the illegality of the 46/2004 Home Office guidance, were finalised without the knowledge contained in the later judgements found in the Pollard, Turner and Laws judicial reviews.

A mechanism to fix such wrongs is a Regulation 32 reconsideration and the legal advice of the PFEW, however it is interpreted, is a gateway that brings to stark realism the judgement of Justice King in Haworth, R (on the application of) v Northumbria Police Authority [2012]  that a reconsideration …

should be construed as a free standing mechanism as part of the system of checks and balances in the regulations to ensure that the pension award, either by way of an initial award or on a review to the former police officer by either the SMP or PMAB, has been determined in accordance with the regulations and that the retired officer is being paid the sum to which he is entitled under the regulations.

…and that refusal of the police pension authority to allow such right to a mechanism to fix a wrong is:

potentially unlawful interference with a ECHR right

We could have saved the effort of the PFEW by telling those who asked that the “agreement” is not congruent with the “checks and balances” demanded by the Regulations.  Excuse the use of deliberate tautology, but the point is so important that it needs to be repeated with different words: the “agreement” is a dubious result caveated by Staffordshire Police’s 2008 mass review program that was itself, by its very nature, not congruent with “checks and balances” demanded by the Regulations.

Before a person  starts to think they should ever acquiesce to any review there needs to be answers.  Not only shall the review be justified to the individual, a suitable interval needs to have elapsed and individual discretion applied based on that person’s circumstances.  The disabled former officer also needs to fix the damage done by any previous unlawful paper review.

We will be pleased to field any questions you may have about the information contained in this post and the PDF above.  Either comment below, so others can benefit from the conversation, or email us for a private chat admin@iodpa.org

Otherwise Healthy

Otherwise Healthy

“A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children

The March 2017 NWEF conference displayed a clear example wherein decision making becomes internally focused, defined by the needs and beliefs of the group.

Everyone nods their head and no-one in the audience calls out “that doesn’t sound right“.   Called “groupthink” it critically clouds decision making and of course the point about groupthink is that, if you are part of the group, you don’t realise that it’s there until it’s too late.

The legal advisor to NWEF, a person at the heart of the Fisher judicial review, harped on about the clarification given in the hearing he lost (note he says it was the PMAB who were the last decision makers, but this review of Mr Fisher’s injury award had Wirz’s fingerprints on it since 2008)

NW [Nicholas Wirz] provided an update on the recent high court judgement Fisher v Northumbria and PMAB. He highlighted the outcome of the judgement confirmed the case law brought about in the cases of Anton, Ayre and Walther (1).
Ground 1 of the Fisher judgement related to comparator and the use of Police Salary, the high court judge quashed the PMAB determination for the reasons that the comparison between injured and uninjured earnings was not analysed sufficiently and there was no rationale as to why police officer salary was not used.
Clarification is provided by this judgement that police officer salary would be the correct comparator where the former officer has only one qualifying injury and is otherwise healthy.

Look at the sentence highlighted bold.  The Fisher JR doesn’t say the police salary is the only correct comparator. It says the police salary should be the start and, if the tests have been passed for the quantum to be calculated, as much effort should go into defining the uninjured as the injured earning capacity.  Uninjured earning capacity could be higher if the person was under-employed as a police officer.  We examined this with an example of an Oral and maxillofacial surgeon  in this blog.

But let us examine the other nonsense about being “otherwise healthy”.  What is Wirz trying to imply here?

glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is a measure of how efficiently kidneys filter the waste from our blood. Healthy young people commonly have GFRs of about 120. A GFR lower than 60 or another marker of kidney damage for more than three months means chronic kidney disease (CKD). At which point, patients become scared. 

But wait a minute. Kidney function declines with age in almost everyone, and the proportion of older people with GFR readings below 60 approaches 50 percent, studies have found. As the older adult population grows, the prevalence may rise even higher.

So there is an age-related decline in kidney function; however, not all individuals will develop CKD with advancing age and not all patients diagnosed with CKD need to worry about dialysis, because that’s what they associate with kidney disease.

When you’re told you have a disease, that’s a bad day.  A doubly bad day for you in the warped world of Wirz:  On the day your kidney disease was diagnosed, you woke up that morning with at least an uninjured earning capacity of a police officer – you went to bed without it, indeed supposedly with no uninjured earning capacity and therefore a default reduction to a band one.  

Should a diagnosis of CKD effect your injury award? No? Yes? Maybe…?

Nicholas Wirz thinks it should because now you are not “otherwise healthy”.

We can hear Wirz shouting at us!  ‘Don’t use your kidney disease example to misrepresent NWEF’s position’.

A “straw man” is when an argument is put forth —usually something extreme or easy to argue against—that is known that the opponent doesn’t support. You put forth a straw man because you know it will be easy for you to knock down or discredit.  We can’t find a word that describes when the argument actually pulls a punch compared to the true position maintained by the opponent – some sort of inverse straw-man.

Chronic Kidney Disease? Pah!, Wirz trumps that with neurological disease, namely Parkinsons.

So let us highlight the guidance Wirz has been providing to SMPs since 2014.

Wirz writes:

e.g. if an individual were to have developed advanced Parkinson’s disease since the last review, such that he was unable to work by reason of the symptoms of that disease alone, then the uninjured earning capacity should be nil. Alternatively, if an officer were to have become generally less fit by reason of advancing age, such that he was no longer able to undertake a physically demanding job, or no longer able to work full time, then the uninjured earning capacity would be reduced accordingly.

“[…] then the uninjured earning capacity should be nil.” That line is worth repeating.

The uninjured earning capacity is the alternative universe “you“.  The you that wasn’t injured; the you that excelled at life; the you that aspired to be the best and had no injury holding you back; the you back in the day when the world was your oyster. It is not the you in the real world, as you are now with co-morbidities. Co-morbidity is the presence of one or more additional diseases or disorders co-occurring with (that is, concomitant or concurrent with) a primary disease or disorder.

Is Wirz a time-lord?  Can he categorically say you would have suffered from Parkinsons (or chronic kidney disease) HAD YOU NOT BEEN INJURED? Maybe the trauma led to the additional disorders?  Who knows.  This is as ridiculous as it gets.

Do you see what Wirz is trying to insert into the brains of those who listen to him?

A former officer has physical injuries all caused on duty.  His injuries have only deteriorated and he has struggled with chronic pain and mental health issues directly related to the chronic pain.  He has taken tricyclic antidepressants for long term analgesia.  He has chronic kidney disease because of the decades of reliance on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

On his fifty-eighth birthday, he is diagnosed with early onset of Parkinson’s disease.  Just when he, and his family, needs his injury pension, Nicholas Wirz wants to make him a zero percent band one and remove thousand of pounds from their income.

But his duty injury is no better!  Is he now two hundred percent disabled? Yes, he has a further disability but this has nothing to do with his permanent disablement for carrying out the full duties of a police officer.  In effect, to reintroduce any concurrent disablement is tantamount to revisiting causation and apportionment.  Such lawyer tricks have been already declared unlawful.

Wirz wants to carry his corruption to the high court in order to “clarify” how things, in his world, should be.  A vulnerable person will be taken through hell just because Nicholas Wirz thinks the law needs to be tested.

This is what IODPA is dealing with.  If only other organisations, those there for the support of those injured on duty, will take up the clarion call and help us to stop these abuses.

 

 

 

 

Redacted/Unredacted

Redacted/Unredacted

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
Roald Dahl

Here’s the reality. This blog and the examples of institutional corruption we are highlighting  against medically-retired former police officers – and likely, those who are both vulnerable and mentally fragile – is part of the large-scale abuse of those with injury awards in this country. To an abuser who likes power and control, a disability is perfect.  The adversary to power and control is exposure.

Exposure can be denied.  So when is something off-limits and how can a public body hide disclosure under the Freedom Of Information Act?  The Freedom of Information Act in the UK does have some limits on disclosure. One method to comply with the act whilst meeting these limits is supplying material in a censored or “redacted” format.

Often you have to take the word of the public body that the redaction has been applied correctly. So when you have both the redacted and un-redacted versions of minutes from the same Avon & Somerset meetings – all of which are concerning their administration (or should that read maladministration) of injury awards – it’s evident that taking this word at face value is a mistake.

Now that these minutes are in the public domain you have the opportunity to decide whether their redaction was legitimate.

Before we get there, let us just discuss redaction.  In this method, a document is made available but with some text removed (often literally with a black marker pen). In the most straightforward cases, this may be just removing the names of junior officials or office staff, usually for privacy reasons.

It’s understandable when  redacted information constitutes personal data, and the public body would be in breach of the Data Protection Act if it were to put such information into the public domain.

But in other cases, large amounts of text are illicitly removed so that documents are almost unreadable and the information value is minimal – for no other reason than they’ll rather you not see it.

This redaction technique is abused so that certain nincompoops can deliberately leave no trace of their decision-making process within the public body they serve.

Strangely enough, such cretins seem to pop up in the administration of injury awards.

Can the disclosure of un-redacted meeting minutes really be prejudicial to the effective conduct of public affairs?  What happens if the public affairs being minuted involves evidence of Malfeasance in a public office, or official misconduct?

Redaction does not give officials an excuse to cover-up the commissioning of their unlawful acts, done in an official capacity, which affects the legitimate performance of true official duties.

It is both highly disturbing and in the public interest to discover an official policy tasked to look at the medical files relating to every individual who was medically retired by a certain deceased police surgeon (employed by Avon & Somerset police between 1972 and 2006), to ascertain if such medical retirement was in their ‘view’ unlawful/illegal.  Especially as this doctor is at the epicentre of an ongoing historical sexual abuse inquiry named Operation Hay.

Potential victims – all who served as police officers – now are suffering the ignominy of a small number of devious employees within Avon & Somerset Police digging through (and without any consent to process) sensitive personal and medical data relating to their injury awards.  In other words, a shadow investigation exists – running parallel to a major criminal inquiry – with the sordid misapprehension that every decision made by this police surgeon (employed by this force for over 30 years) is now open to be revisited.

Isn’t it absolutely abhorrent that the force chooses to investigate only the things relating to their mania to reduce injury awards and seemingly they are in no hurry to question the blood tests of convicted drunk drivers, rape cases or assaults this police surgeon helped to convict?

The IPCC is currently looking into allegations that when a number of officers – likely the same people whose medical files retained by this force are now being ferreted by Dr David Bulpitt –  came forward on separate occasions throughout the 1990s to complain about Dr Bunting, those complaints were not properly investigated by the force.  In other words, whilst the IPCC’s investigates the Operation Hay cover-up the same force is conspiring against the victims whose complaints were brushed aside.

Here are a few choice sentences that the eager redaction gremlins working in A&S attempted to hide from Freedom Of Information disclosure of the minutes of an Avon & Somerset injury award liaison group meeting.  Redaction that we’ve recovered (hence the slightly different font) that tried to hide that Dr David Bulpitt, the current force medical advisor, has been tasked with the thorough inspection of the files of potential victims.

DBu [David Bulpitt] to review all individuals’ records identified through Op Hay to ascertain which Dr awarded their band or undertook a review of a band given.Avon & Somerset OH Review meeting 23rd October 2015 action log

And

During the course of conversations it became clear that there were some concerns around why certain awards may have been made by the Dr in post at the time. It was agreed that DBu would review all of the names that are on the Op Hay list to see if they had been given an illegal/incorrect award as a result of being seen by the individual who is currently subject of an investigation.Avon & Somerset OH Review meeting 23rd October 2015 Minutes

Of course, A&S do not want the public to know this as it contrary to the law for them, in any way imaginable, to try to revisit old statutory decisions – so they take the black marker to it and redact it all in an attempt to cover it up.

Fortunately for the public good, there is an un-redacted version in the public domain.  The left side shows what happens when you give a black permanent marker to crazed scribblings of an over-enthusiastic denier of public disclosure:

Redacted Un-redacted
minutes-23rd-october-2015-before minutes-23rd-october-2015-after
 Raw & Unformated Version

Click on the image and a new tab will show the disclosure in it’s entirety.  You can use the arrows in the bottom right to toggle to the page two for those with multiple pages.pdf-next-page
We now also get to see evidence that legal services has finally accepted that the GMC enforces that every individual seen by a SMP is a patient of that SMP.

DJ [Daniel Johnson] indicated that due to the information forward to Legal Services from DBu [Dr David Bulpitt] they now had a much clearer understanding of the difficulties being experienced as a result of the GMC indicating that each individual under the review is classified as being a patientAvon & Somerset OH Review meeting 23rd October 2015 Minutes

That each and every person seen by a Selected Medical Practitioner (the prerequisite of such being GMC registration) is their patient is fact – after all it is a medical question – but they want to censure that they now accept it.  We’ve been trying to tell them this for years: the GMC guidance is unambiguous:

The first duty of a doctor registered with the GMC is to make the care of their patient their first concern. The term ‘patient’ in this guidance also refers to employees, clients, athletes and anyone else whose personal information you hold or have access to, whether or not you care for them in a traditional therapeutic relationship.
GMC Confidentiality: disclosing information for insurance, employment and similar purposes

So why is it redacted?  Could it be because it proves their position wrong perhaps.

They also decided to retract information about Operation Hay, as mentioned above, and they talk about the implied threat that legal services are going to put in the letter about suspending an injury award when consent to medical information is withdrawn.

This leads us to the ‘action log’ from the same meeting.  They redacted the recorded statement that their lawyer, Daniel Johnson, stated that such suspension is unlawful but, as an aside, they’ll still write a letter dripping with a purely heinous form of blackmail, that will be sent out to imply an unlawful thing will be actually be carried out.

Were these threatening letters actually sent out?  Perhaps they were, and the poor recipient capitulated to a threat with menaces.  Ironically, to acquiesce to such blackmail usually results in a ‘gun for hire’ SMP applying apportionment or some unlawful earnings assessment to reduce the injury award; see the predicament the former officer faces? – they are truly damned if they don’t and then damned anyway.

If anyone reading this has received such a letter, then they are advised to seek counsel with a specialist solicitor.

Looking behind the black permanent marker and you see this:

DJ advised the Pension Authority that when sending out letters to individuals who have withdrawn consent that a reduction in banding given can only be implied as you cannot predetermine and outcome if release is not madeAction Log 23rd October 2015

So far they have obviously redacted the truths that we have been shouting for a while, but few in a position of power believed – the truth that they manipulate the law for their own ends.

Here is the action log for the 23/10/2015 meeting in its ingloriously malignant splendour:

Redacted Un-redacted
action-log-23rd-october-2015-before action-log-23rd-october-2015-after
 Raw & Unformated Version

Rather than try to hide it by redacting, the stuff found within shouldn’t have been thought, said nor written in the first place.

What else have these deviants been up to?

The 1st of March minutes has a section redacted that mentions reviewing people without passing the medical question to the SMP. On it’s own, this isn’t too aberrant.  However, if you factor in the draconian practice this force has conducted to drag severely ill people – those who haven’t had any correspondence from the force for a long time – in front of Dr Philip Johnson without exemption, you start to wonder why the sudden deviation from their usual behaviour.

Apparently a band four (therefore one of Dr Bulpitt’s  unfavoured selfish and preposterous few) and band one were reviewed on paper by Dr Bulpitt himself, without the demand to be medically examined.  Rather a change of tactic here given that Dr Philip Johnson earned £74,220 for 46 days work from Avon & Somerset in from December 1st 2015 to 11th October 2016.

Redacted Un-redacted
minutes-1st-march-2016-before minutes-1st-march-2016-after

If Bulpitt was doing the work of a SMP, why was Johnson still being paid?  And why are some retired officers forced to see Dr Johnson and interrogated for two hours when others get a free pass for a paper review?  Consistency is not their strong point.

And finally onto the 14th June 2016 minutes.  This is the excerpt that has been redacted from the document on the left:

RW raised the issues of information disclosed via FOI’s, as LG personal email  had been disclosed, although we are unsure through which avenue FOI or
Subject Access request.
Action: SA to check with relevant depts. and CD to check with JK  SA/CD

RW is Richard Wand.  He is a former constable and now a civilian employed by Avon & Somerset Federation JBB as a Regulations and Welfare Advisor

Redacted Un-redacted
14th-june-2016-notes-of-iod-liaison-group-mtg-before 14th-june-2016-notes-of-iod-liaison-group-mtg-after
Raw & Unformated version

Hardly a section that screams out to be redacted given LG is unidentified and RW is listed, un-redacted, as an attendee: Richard Wand RW Police Federation.  There does not seem to be any sane reason why redaction has been implemented but it is a clear example why you shouldn’t trust the whys and wherefores they use to justify redacting something.

They want to hide behind the black permanent marker.  Unfortunately on this occasion the marker was filled with disappearing ink.

Abuse of the Freedom of Information Act is bad enough when it happens.  When it is the Police performing the abuse the affect is magnified exponentially as their expected standard is higher given their position and that they have a near-monopoly on the use of coercive force.

It is also clear that when these people do things in the full knowledge that they are wrong they put aside the fact that the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public is a significant determinant of police effectiveness.

For those reading this, shocked and with their mouths agape, staring at a screen and trying to parse everything that has happened, here’s a recap:

  • The lead solicitor for the Legal Services department of Avon & Somerset constabulary has confirmed that Regulation 33 PIBR 2006 cannot be used to punish the withdrawal of medical consent.  Despite this, he is fully prepared to deceive a member of the public into believing that their injury award can be punitively reduced by suggestion alone.  This policy had been redacted as a means of censorship to avoid the ensuing scandal. 
  • The force medical advisor of the same police force that employed a doctor (now deceased), whose actions are currently under investigation for dozens of sex attacks on young officers during medical examinations, has taken it upon himself to revisit final statutory decisions by looking whether all the ill-health retirements decided by the police pension authority, over a period of 30 years, were unlawful.   This policy had been redacted as a means of censorship to avoid the ensuing scandal.

You might think that sounds conspiratorial. It is.

This is more than just isolated bad-apples.  The utterings of those who attended these IOD liaison meeting meetings was not redacted by them – powers above them allowed this happen.  Another internal department would’ve been complicit in deciding  to remove whatever they considered sensational:  Corporate Information Management, Legal Services and no doubt, members of the senior executive team must have had a role to authorise this.  You can imagine how it was said, with a red-faced senior figure screaming “whatever you do, don’t let that get out!

What does it say about the culture of ethics existing in such an organisation that allows a cover-up to evolve into a conspiracy.

When a member of Parliament gives such a damning speech in the House of Commons – Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con) on the Chief Constable Of Avon And Somerset Police Force – there is clearly a systemic ‘rotten barrel’ explanation that permeates through the senior management subculture.

From this point onwards do not give the police force you served with the benefit of the doubt.  When you are sent a threatening letter, think that they are probably lying and trying to coerce you to do something you have no lawful obligation to do.

If you are disclosed heavily redacted information then demand them to explain the exemption applied.  If they refuse to explain why each and every sentence has been blacked out then take the matter to the ICO.

The minutes should be specific to the matter being minuted.  You asked for disclosure from that meeting and therefore everything talked about, excluding the obvious personal information, should be in play for disclosure.

Hiding behind a veil of secrecy is an act deployed by Soviet Union’s KGB and East Germany’s Stasi.  It is unforgivable for such tactics to be seen in the UK.

As our skin crawls, it is worth forcing ourselves to look at the reality – we must confront not only the scale of these abused, disabled victims but also this country’s failure to help them.

 

 

SMP has left disabled former officers adrift…

SMP has left disabled former officers adrift…

Allegedly Dr Philip Johnson is no longer working for Avon & Somerset Constabulary as their nominated Selected Medical Practitioner.  Given there are 15 band 4s, under amoral intent referred to Dr Johnson for his consideration of substantial alteration to their medical condition, who saw said SMP over 3 months ago and still not received a decision, it is a shocking indictment of the arrogance of Avon & Somerset Constabulary.

So, what are the options open to the police pension authority now?

They have an obligation, indeed a legal duty to complete the review process. There is nothing in the Regulations which covers the circumstances where a SMP refuses to decide or can’t decide. The Regulations say that the PPA ‘shall refer for decision’ the statutory question of degree of disablement. Having referred it, and having got no decision, then the process is complete and it is shocking that severely disabled civilians have had no letter explaining the delay; no update, nothing but total silence, as if the HR department at Portishead are pretending as if nothing has happened.  At the least, the police pension authority and those delegated in its administration are culpable of serious maladministration; at most there is a case to be answered for Misfeasance in a public office.

A review is a highly stressful life event and this has affected the lives of those concerned since 29th May 2014.  Almost a year.  Some of the 16 have had serious relapses of their mental and physical health others have had surgical operations.  Why is the federation not asking questions?  Why is the force being so opaque?  The answers will be heard.

What have the Romans (Federation ) ever done for us?

What have the Romans (Federation ) ever done for us?

What have the Federation ever done for us?

Made matters worse.  How dare we rock the establishment.  How dare we challenge the unlawful administration of Injury on Duty Awards !  Just know your place, show your under-belly and engage !  (If they ‘do you over’ you can always appeal they said).

We have asked the Federation to take the force to task, for them to make it clear that any review of a injury on duty award is under the discretion of the force, pertinent to the circumstances of the individual and the exercise to be undertaken, and the reviewing body’s duty and only duty on such a review, is to decide whether since then there has been a substantial change.

What a surprise it was when it was discovered that the local branch who should be there to help are the ones that put together the guidance that the force is using to justify their review programme.

You can imagine the shock to hear that the local Federation welfare officer told the force that to have no earning capacity due to the degree of disability, the person has to be in a wheelchair.  What about those with mental illness Mr ‘local Federation welfare officer’ or those with PTSD ?  Do they have to be in a wheelchair to be unemployable ?

FOI 1231 Magic being helpful

FOI 1231 Magic at work

FOI 1231 Magics masterpiece

Mr Magic, the review is not a repeat of the earning capacity part of the process.  That has been decided when the award was first ‘awarded’ on the original decision and is final.  A review is consideration of substantial change since the last final decision – not a fresh assessment.