Senior officers' forced retirement 'only option'

THE chief constable of Surrey Police has admitted?a cost-cutting decision to force senior officers with more than 30 years' service to retire had left some of them "angry and upset", but that it was the "only tool available" to deal with a shrinking budget.

The move was approved last week by Surrey Police Authority, along with another plan to put on the market?several police stations that have?been deemed surplus to requirements.

The force is now the first in England to invoke 23-year-old legislation compelling senior officers to retire, with the cull due to begin early next year.

This week, Mr Rowley said forced retirement?was "not the best way of doing things but the only tool we’ve got".

Preparations to restructure the force were first considered by senior officers and the police authority late last year.

Mr Rowley said: “We came to the view six months ahead of the [general] election that there were going to be big cuts in the public sector, and rather than waiting for them to happen, [we should] get ahead of the game.

"We are determined that delivery of policing in Surrey won’t suffer. We are probably going to have to save 15 to 20% of our?budget. That’s going to be difficult.

"One of the things we have done is change the way we organise the force so that I can try and run the force with fewer senior leaders. In terms of inspectors and through to chief superintendents, it is trying to run it with 40 fewer of them.

“If we wanted to make the savings that we wanted from cutting back senior leaders, we had to find a way to force it.

“There is this odd provision in police regulations that goes back a long time... to force people to retire who have got more than their 30 years’ service and take a full pension.

“It was always there. We didn’t think we would need to use it. Over the last few months it's become increasingly clear if we want to save the savings we want to so that we can protect the frontline PCs and sergeants who are out there doing their day-to-day job, then that was the only thing that we could do.

“We took specialist legal advice and last week took the decision to the police authority, saying this is not the best way of doing things but it is the only tool available to us.?

"The reality is it's probably 30 people over the next three years who will get forced out. Probably half of those would have retired anyway and this is just making it a certainty.

"Of the others, some are relaxed about it, some are angry and upset as you would expect.”

When the cost-cutting proposals were first announced, Mr Rowley said that the money saved would pay for an extra 200 officers patrolling the county’s streets.

The number recruited this year was a few short of 100, and?given the scale of government cuts the chief constable said he?could now not guarantee that the initial target would still be met.

“How the Home Office shares out their cuts to the 43 police forces isn’t clear yet and they should be announcing that in December.

“I certainly don’t see us going backwards from the extra officers we have recruited this year and I still hope we are going to meet that target. We are not going to be certain for a little while yet though.”

As for the proposed sale of police stations including Byfleet, Ash, Ripley, Sunbury, Lightwater, Frimley and Lingfield - with neighbourhood teams set to move into council offices or other community buildings instead - Mr Rowley said: "What this is not about is withdrawal from communities.

"Over the past three years or so we have been looking at if we can do better if we have local police officers working more closely, for example, with the local council.

"In Woking and Runnymede and other areas, the local police officers who patrol the local beats have been working out of the council offices there for two or three years.

“What we see through that is that they do a much better job because they are joined up with wardens and council officials who do housing. Having a joined up approach means they are tackling those problems in the area much more effectively.

“People do value local police stations, but far more they value the officer on the beat, the PCSO on the beat and that visible activity.

"We are not withdrawing, we are going to share buildings in neighbourhoods, we are going to be more visible, and we are trying to make sure we are in the right places because some of these old buildings aren’t even in the right places anymore.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

Heads forced to sign blank cheques

Accounting woes plague our foreign missions

– Auditor General’s Report

Just as Guyanese are migrating to other countries it would appear that the accounting troubles which plague the Government are migrating too.
The Auditor General’s report of 2009 indicates that all may not be well with the foreign missions Guyana maintains in several countries around the globe. In his last examination of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the AG highlighted a number of discrepancies in the accounting performance of several missions as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
One of the first matters discussed was that of remittances and recording by four foreign missions: Guyana’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the Consulate in New York, the Consulate in Toronto and the Embassy in Brussels.
The Permanent Mission to the United Nations was in need of reconciliation for the sum of USD$15,763.99 which the Director General is seeking to have written off as a loss. Meanwhile the Consulates to New York and Toronto were cited for not banking/remitting revenues in a timely manner. The Embassy in Brussels had a slightly different problem wherein they were not keeping adequate record of the funds converted to the currency of trade in Brussels as against the USD funds received from the Sub-Treasury in Washington D.C.
On the home front, the AG said in his report that the funds required to meet the operational expenditure of the overseas missions on a monthly basis were being sent either at the end of the month or in the following month – a situation which has been going on for some years. The AG highlighted possible consequences of these late payments. Among them were the possibilities of the missions’ bank accounts being overdrawn or subjected to interest charges or other penalties. He also indicated that such occurrences could “adversely affect the missions’ credibility established over the years”.
In a rare laudatory statement for the AG, the report praised the officers of these missions for their prudence in dealing with these matters. The report said, “Surely, it is to the credit of the functioning Financial Attaches, Executive Officers (Accounts) and the Representatives of the Head of Budget Agency that the missions’ accounts were neither overdrawn nor were there situations of tarnished credibility over the period.”
The Ministry’s response to the finding was that they “will make every effort to remit funds to Missions in a timely manner.” The recommendation that the Ministry remit funds one month in advance to overcome the three-week processing period required for remittances was also included in the report on the matter.
Another issue raised was that of the Embassy in Washington D.C. transferring funds to nine of Guyana’s overseas missions on the Ministry’s behalf and receiving no acknowledgement of receipt from these missions with the exception of two. The Permanent Mission to the United Nations and to a lesser extent the Embassy in Beijing, were the only ones to submit acknowledgements. The other Consuls, Embassies and High Commissions were in Brazil, Belgium, Venezuela, India, Suriname and New York and together they accounted for some USD $2.757M. Meanwhile the total disbursement for the nine consulates during the accounting period was USD $4.903M.
On the flip side of the coin, the AG pointed out that the Accountant General’s office is yet to acknowledge the remittances of revenues from Guyana’s overseas missions. The revenues for the current period are some $181.458M, and according to the report, some acknowledgements have been outstanding for longer than ten years.
Another issue raised by the Auditor General was that of diplomatic staffing. He highlighted incidents where the activities of the High Commissioner posted to London and the Ambassador posted to Brussels, both saw their ability to fulfill the mandates of their positions curtailed by the need to undertake administrative tasks that were clearly the responsibility of other officers that these missions did not have in their employ at the time.
In the case of Brussels, the lack of adequate staffing saw the Ambassador undertaking the “online” banking for the Embassy, transferring salaries of home-based staff and in the absence of the Representative of the Head of the Budget Agency, carrying out supervisory checks on the accounting process.
The AG looked at two repercussions of this lack of staffing to which end the report states, “… diplomatic work is likely to suffer if either the Ambassador or the diplomatic staff goes on leave or is otherwise engaged.”
The report went on to state, “The shortage of staffing also resulted in critical gaps in the accounting process, where it was necessary for the Ambassador to sign blank cheques and bank transfer orders when away from the Embassy for periods over two weeks.”
Further to which it was highlighted that in every mission the financial duties were not sufficiently segregated for sound accounting procedures to be maintained. There were cases of one officer undertaking related duties such as the preparation of payment and receipt vouchers; executing payments while simultaneously writing up the Sub-accountant’s cash book, the expenditure statements and the cash book; the preparation and signing of cheques and the preparation of bank reconciliation statements, collection, deposit and remittance of revenue.
The AG went on to say in his report that “It is only because of the honesty of the officers manning these units that the weaknesses were not exploited”.
Meanwhile the Ministry’s response on the matter was that they are “looking at the possibility of recruiting additional staff.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

'Mothers forced onto busy road' by station works

CONTROVERSIAL improvement works?at Epsom railway station appear to have got off to a bad start as residents and councillors claim that safety barriers erected around the site are forcing mothers with prams onto?a busy main road.

The ￡4.5m project has been shrouded in controversy since it was approved at an Epsom & Ewell Borough Council meeting in April, amid angry outbursts from local people.

Since then the project has been beset with problems, firstly?from taxi drivers?banished from the station to a small rank across the road who described the plan as "ill conceived".

The council also voted down initial attempts by contractors to alter the planning permission to allow overnight works, with a final decision due to be made?on that matter?on November 11.

And, having erected metal fencing around the site to allow works to begin, contractors Solum Regeneration have been hit?with further criticism over the width of pavement left in Waterloo Road.

“You cannot get a double buggy through there properly,” said Janet Burgess, a resident of nearby Horsley Close.

“There is no-one in place to deal with these problems down there [on the site]. So it feels like there is nothing we can do about it at the moment.

“How can a fence on the pavement that forces pedestrians onto the road be an acceptable situation for the public?

“I have raised it with Councillor Neil Dallen and he has put all these concerns to the construction company directly.”

Cllr Dallen met?directors from Solum Regeneration and parent company Kier?last Thurdsay (November 4).

And he told Get Surrey he was still hopeful that a resolution could be found – although the developers must make significant concessions to do so.

“They could put these things right if they wanted to,” he added.

“At the meeting I brought up a whole load of things that residents are concerned about and they took notes and promised me they will do something about them.

“It is small things, like there should be a telephone number clearly displayed for residents to call if they have any concerns but when I drove past today [Friday, November 5], it still wasn’t up.

When?asked whether he believed the developers cared about the interests of Epsom residents, he said: “They want to be good, absolutely, but they have got to do things, not just talk about doing things.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here