Councillors and Police and Crime Commissioner hear about collaborative working between Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service at public meeting
Councillors and Police and Crime Commissioner hear about collaborative working between Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service at public meeting
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What do a car crash, road safety, A-boards, Wirral Council and the Merseyside OPCC have in common?
What do a car crash, road safety, A-boards, Wirral Council and the Merseyside OPCC have in common?
Yesterday evening’s meeting of Wirral Council’s Business and Overview Scrutiny Committee was for once quite literally car crash TV.
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Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Wirral Council) 14th September 2016 (Agenda item 4 Road Safety – Reducing Pedestrian Casualties starts at 2m:21s) Part 1 of 5
Cllr Warren Ward reminded those present at the start of his declaration of interest by saying,
“Chair, I’ve got a declaration of interest.
In the report it mentions a quote from the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner.
In 2014, I was employed as a private secretary to errm the Police and Crime Commissioner Panel.”
I am of course welcome that Cllr Warren Ward brought this up, as Wirral’s criminal justice system caught up with Merseyside’s former Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner on the subject of road safety (although the embarrassing incident below wasn’t mentioned at last night’s meeting). At the time of the offence she was Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner.
Cllr Ann O’Byrne (who for the purposes of clarity and avoidance of doubt is a completely different councillor to the current Merseyside Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner Cllr Sue Murphy) according to a report in the Liverpool Echo pled guilty at Wirral Magistrates’ Court to two driving offences which were
driving “without due care and attention”
and
failing to stop after a road accident
after crashing into an orange BMW Mini. She pled guilty, was fined and had to pay prosecution costs of £565.
Of course there will be many regular readers who will see parallels between this behaviour and that of some politicians.
In the past some councillors have been accused of failing to stop going on after political accidents (such as the library closure programme only halted by a government ordered public inquiry), of generally being politicians behaving “without due care and attention” and also in the process of being more interested in scoring petty party political points and damaging the peoples’ trust in democratic systems in the process.
But then I shouldn’t be too critical as there are plenty of good politicians too that unfortunately get tarred by the same brush by association!
Certainly there is a lot of car crash TV I have filmed at public meetings over the years!
Moving swiftly back to the subject of the current Police and Crime Commissioner Jane Kennedy. She was asking questions on Monday afternoon about the effect on jobs of a joint Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service project (involving consultants Deloittes are doing) at an eleven minute public meeting of the Police and Fire Collaboration Committee (see video of the meeting below). You can read the agenda and reports to do with that on Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority’s website.
As this is a committee of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority, I had better declare an interest as an Appellant in a First-tier Tribunal case in which Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority are Second Respondent (case reference EA⁄2016⁄0054).
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Police and Fire Collaboration Committee (Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority) Monday 12th September 2016
On the subject of legal action, at the meeting of last night’s meeting of Wirral Council’s Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee, the subject of A-boards and pedestrian safety was raised with respect to a display outside a fruit and vegetable shop in Moreton which was previously covered by this blog in 2012 (including a photo of the shop display in question).
David Rees (a road safety manager at Wirral Council) made it clear at the meeting that Wirral Council hadn’t received any legal claims for compensation from pedestrians arising from A-boards on the footway.
Conservative councillor Gerry Ellis stated that the person who had raised the issue with Wirral Council about the A-board outside a Moreton shop had been threatened with legal action by Wirral Council and asked a senior manager at Wirral Council (the Head of Environment and Regulation Mark Smith) to explain why.
However the Labour Chair of the Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee Councillor Michael Sullivan intervened before Mark Smith had a chance to answer. I will also point out that from my recollection at least one Labour councillor expressed the view at the meeting that Wirral Council employees should not be criticised by Wirral Council councillors.
The Chair decided unilaterally that in his view the report was purely about pedestrian casualties and that as he knew of no recorded accidents known to Wirral Council involving A-boards, Cllr Sullivan told Cllr Ellis that Wirral Council’s Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee wasn’t the forum for discussing such matters and ended any debate on the matter.
Finally, the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner have been in touch with me.
During the 30 working day inspection period this year (which finished mid-August 2016) I requested some invoices. However I challenged whether some of the blacked out bits were done properly in accordance with the legislation. Technically not providing the information inside the 30 working day inspection period is unlawful (although it’s a civil law matter).
So I challenged it and around a month later got back three invoices from the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside with less redaction.
Can the citizens of Merseyside expect the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside to understand the law? Would that be expecting too much considering these invoices are to their “legal services department”? Or was this a genuine mistake? Or am I too robust in press scrutiny of the local public sector?
1) An invoice from Drystone Chambers (based in London) for the services of Mr Gregory Perrins (a barrister) at a Police Appeals Tribunal held on the 4th December 2015 for £1,632.
2) An invoice from Mishcon de Reya (a London-based firm of solicitors) was for £6,000 for supply of legal services in the matter “Royal Mail – VAT Invoices for Postage Services”)
3) An invoice from Slater and Gordon UK LLP for £2,221.92 (a Manchester based firm of solicitors) for professional charges involving criminal defence and disbursements.
Why did the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside spend “up to £16,474” on an “austerity” review with Liverpool John Moores University?
Why did the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside spend “up to £16,474” on an “austerity” review with Liverpool John Moores University?
The author of this piece was briefly employed by Liverpool John Moores University on work experience in February 1997 (although this was 15 years before Police and Crime Commissioners existed). However in the interests of transparency I’m declaring it as an interest.
The recently reelected Jane Kennedy (Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside) who is pictured above to the left of the photo has often spoken in public about her views on the Merseyside Police budget, the funding of the Merseyside Police and has even referred to her “sleepless nights” worrying about it all.
The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside spent up to £16,474 (see the purchase order below) with Liverpool John Moores University to “commission a scoping review of the scale, dimensions and implications of austerity on community safety, crime prevention and diversionary services within Merseyside.”
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Interviews to happen with 8 consultancy firms over tender for confidential advice on cuts to Merseyside’s police and fire services
In the interests of openness and transparency I’ll declare at the outset that I’m the Appellant in a sub judice First-Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) case involving Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority (2nd Respondent).
I was briefly remembering what happened five years ago in 2011.
Five years ago (well four years and ten months ago) if you remember it was the summer when there were riots. The riots were so widespread the police had difficulty coping. It was similar reasons that led to the 1981 Toxteth riots.
The Lib Dems’ attitude towards ethnic minorities was unfortunately the kind of attitude (especially from one of the two parties in the Coalition government at the time) that led to the riots. I remember vividly being at a North West Lib Dem regional conference where a party member stood up and proudly stated to the entire room of dozens of party activists that he would never choose a candidate from an ethnic minority background. So if you wondered why all the Lib Dem MPs (and indeed many of their councillors) were white, male and pale you should understand now!
There was of course an uproar from those from ethnic minorities in the room and the chair had to settle things down before the person who’d said it got drowned out through a lot of shouting.
In 2011 a black man Mark Duggan was shot dead by the police, in 1981 the Toxteth riots followed the Brixton riots which were also triggered by poor relations between the police and ethnic minorities.
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Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority’s Police and Fire Collaboration Committee 7th June 2016
However what’s the point of mentioning the above? Well Tuesday’s meeting of the Police and Fire Collaboration Committee (you can watch video of the 13 minute meeting above) reminded me of a change in the culture of the police. A long time ago I used to report on the Merseyside Police Authority (before there was a Police and Crime Commissioner who started in November 2012), so I remember how matters involving Merseyside Police used to be.
In fact when I used to report on the Merseyside Police Authority it was obvious from the statistics shown to councillors that you were still far more likely to be stop searched in the Wirral area (although there were problems all over Merseyside to varying degrees) if you were from an ethnic minority background.
When Deputy Chief Constable, Andy Cooke, QPM (soon to be Chief Constable) didn’t use his microphone during the Police and Crime Collaboration Committee and my wife said she couldn’t hear, he apologised to my wife and turned it on.
This shows things have changed. The police "half" of the committee has learnt from bitter experience that it is better to apologise, learn from and correct their mistakes and move on. This is indeed the very hard to learn cultural lesson to be take away from high profile matters that happened a long time ago involving the police as a whole.
One of the nine Peelian principles is, “To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.”
However the fire service/fire authority culture is different. The Chair interrupted the meeting to tell my wife off for interrupting (which he does while looking directly at me rather than her).
I’m really am not entirely sure why he looked at me when he was saying this rather than her? Did he want me to say something to her? Is he not aware of Article 21(1)?
Just for clarity I was standing up behind the camera, she was sitting down to my left. So you’d have to look in completely different directions to face myself or Leonora. You can hear clearly my response to him on the video above.
Bear in mind that already during the meeting two people had commented on the minutes and hadn’t ask permission for the Chair to speak and aren’t on the Police and Fire Collaboration Committee itself.
The Chair indeed didn’t say anything to them (for the purposes of clarity those two were I think from memory the Deputy Chief Constable referred to above and if I am correct the Chief of Staff for the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner)!
The recently elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside Jane Kennedy wasn’t there. Her Deputy PCC Cllr Sue Murphy was (yes Jane Kennedy had previously stated she wouldn’t have a deputy but changed her mind part way through her previous term of office). Thankfully this meant the meeting started on time as a previous meeting of this Committee had been delayed from starting because Jane Kennedy arrived late and the person chairing the meeting didn’t want to start without her.
The meeting of the Police and Fire Collaboration Committee agreed to hire consultants to advise them on how Merseyside Police, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service (and Authority) and the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside can work better together.
I realise some may well comment along the lines of isn’t this what managers in the public sector on six-figure salaries are paid to do? However have you ever heard of a public sector manager either volunteering to offer themselves the sack or massively reducing the headcount they manage?
Yet in these times of seemingly never ending austerity, you the 1.4 million members of the public on Merseyside who finance the fire service may well ask why does more money need to be spent on consultants?
Eight organisations have applied for the role and there will be interviews later this month. You can read the detail here.
There are many areas within the Corporate Services Review, you can read the list on page 3 here.
Unusually (as they seem to have been quite vocal at previous meetings about the impact on jobs) as far as I could tell the trade union representatives weren’t present for this meeting.
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Consultation question 2 deals with whether the functions of the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority should be transferred to the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside. However in the proposed response to the consultation Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority have made it clear that they are against this.
I am quoting from a longer proposed response to consultation question 2. FRS means Fire & Rescue Service. PCC means Police and Crime Commissioner.
“Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority (MFRA) wish to make it clear within this response that they have no intention of ceding responsibility of the FRS to the PCC. MFRA believe that as a result of their in depth understanding and experience of the FRS they are best placed to provide the political leadership necessary to support the Service through the next round of budget cuts.”
The second substantive item on the agenda of the meeting is what’s called the Emergency Services Collaboration Programme which according to section 13 of the report there is “the potential for significant impact on the staff of
both organisations”. The organisations that refers to are Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service. Appendix 1 (Blue Light Collaboration Opportunity Assessment) to the report implies that some of the savings from shared services between the two organisations will come from staff costs within the two organisations.
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