• Highways and Byways – The ‘Squires’ up at the ‘Big House’;

     • The Scandal grows;

     • Apeing the bullies of Lancashire;

     • The times they are a changing;

     • The new smarter generation of FSVs;

     •  Lancashire knows what the problem is but buries its head in the sand;

     •  No avoiding criminal culpability for individual and corporate fraud.

It is important that the Bugler sets the scenes; illuminates the ‘characters’, and paints the attitudes and practices with which the ‘The Thieving Magpies’ up at the ‘Big House’ perform their respective roles and which, rather like any good Gilbert and Sullivan farce, displays each character’s unseemly attributes, perverse skills, duplicity, and syrupy deviousness when they are questioned, or challenged.

The purpose of this journalistic exercise is once more to firstly present to the UK taxpaying Public, for judgement, the documentary evidence, secondly, to support this evidence with mature reasoned conclusions within the Derbyshire Principle based on the first-hand experience of disabled Fire Service Veterans and their families in Lancashire, and the remainder of the UK, who have suffered and are suffering from institutionalised fraud and arbitrary oppression.

It is clear from direct contacts with the Bugler from disabled FSVs nationwide, and in fact worldwide, allied with the vertical graph of ‘visits’ on the Bugler website, that disabled FSVs and their families are awakening to this pension scandal and what it means for them in terms of financial disenfranchisement over the past years.

A scandal which continues to develop rather than diminish, and how FSVs’  trust has been abused and  breached, and their common decency been preyed upon and duped for years, if not decades.

There is palpable evidence that other Fire Authorities’ ‘experts’ have unwisely been copying and imitating the lawless thuggery and abuses of the Lancashire FRS in defrauding their FSVs without attempting to read the law.

This is a serious error of corporate judgement.

To assist them in correcting their errors the Bugler reminds them that in its online Library it has provided the applicable law and the Home Office ‘92 ‘Commentary’, thus there can be no excuses for ignorance of the pension laws. Go here.

These Fire Authorities believe that they can make sweeping financial claims of overpayments against individual FSVs without first establishing a legal basis for their claims-they are wrong to do so; without identifying to FSVs how this pension maladministration arose in the first place and who was responsible for it in law- they are wrong to do so; without producing a detailed financial schedule of these alleged overpayments based on audit, not fiction- they are wrong to do so.

Furthermore, these Fire Authorities believe that by bullying and insensitively threatening the peace and tranquillity of respectable retired Fire Service Veterans and sending forth such intimidating messages that they will bring FSVs to heel- they will not succeed; that they hold their ‘purse strings’-they are wrong; that they are unchallengeable in law- they are wrong again; and that they can ride roughshod over individual FSVs, their families, and their beneficiaries after death-again they are wrong in attempting to do so.

Fire Authorities in self-righteousness overlook salient facts, not least that we are all in the 21^st Century, and that one fundamental circumstance has changed, the FSV has retired.

With their retirement went the manacles of the ‘Big House’ attitudes of ‘we own you’, or if you prefer, the employment/promotional blackmail with which they have imposed their parsimonious will throughout a Firefighter’s service life.

The times may have changed but not for the moment their attitudes, but they will…

In fact, what Fire Authorities will discover in an unpleasant ‘Newton’s Cradle’ rebound effect, having attracted the ire of the FSVs, is that thousands of disabled FSVs will now discover that because of gross maladministration of pensions by these in-house ‘experts’, which goes back over decades, FSVs have not been paid the correct type of ‘enhanced’ ill- health pension-to say little of careless audit calculations, even in those pensions which are supposed to be correct.

As a consequence Fire Authorities will find themselves with extraordinary underpayment bills and ‘loss of amenity’ claims from these self-same disabled FSVs whom they have attempted to dupe, bully, and defraud.

Bills which will also attract compound interest because Authorities have unjustly enriched their coffers by underpaying FSVs with incorrect unenhanced pensions instead of the correct ‘enhanced’ pensions which they ought to have been paying  to disabled FSVs, some of whom have had their pensions in payments for 3 decades or more.

This is the crude lesson which disrespect and bullying brings upon these ‘experts’ and their Squires up at the ‘Big House’ who in discovering to their horror their own gross incompetence, then decided not only to blame the victims in a malicious cover up, but ever the greedy opportunists-whilst bleating about protecting the public purse which they had signally failed to protect in the first place-then decided that FSVs were handy ‘cash cows’ to surreptitiously enhance their balance sheets during these financially stringent times.

This was, and is, simple bare faced criminal fraud.

However, Fire Authorities forgot in this 21^st Century, that these better educated FSVs would not only challenge and question but also had the intellectual capability and tools to investigate, to obtain hidden documents,  and to probe, with, as the Fire Authorities will now see, unforeseen dire corporate financial consequences.

But then this is what, in cause and effect, they produced when in betrayal they used ham fisted oppression and arbitrary bullying to disturb the hives of honest worker bees…

When these Fire Authorities’ arrogance finally ebbs away, or is chastised out of them, and they deign to study the law-for once-they will conclude that the legal Opinion of an eminent Barrister published on the Bugler is a cogent and extraordinary professional work of legal analyses on the applicable pension law within this fraud.

Which part of this law is it that they do not understand or do not want to understand?

Repeatedly Fire Authorities have had to be reminded that they have firstly the Statutory duty to establish their liability to pay, and secondly, the liability to pay the correct enhanced ill-health pension in a timely manner.

It seems having placed this detailed information before Lancashire FRS, and it must be said now other Fire Authorities, they have a collective duty of care to their FSVs to investigate this information and to publicly report their findings and conclusions to the affected individual FSVs in the first instance and to the collective Membership of their individual Schemes, which is also their Statutory duty.

Why have they failed to do so?

Can it be they have examined this information and have concluded that indeed they are wrong in law – And can it be that the financial implications and impact on their budgets of their maladministration, and now malfeasance, are simply too horrendous to contemplate?

What will they do now?

Engage in more dirty work at the xroads with more imaginative cover-ups? Go into a huddle with their malleable ‘sleepy hollow’ councillors in a collective state of shocked immobile denial? Or wait for the Ministerial Enquiry which is bound to follow?

What also seems to have slipped these individual Squires and ‘experts’ minds is failing to consider their own legal exposure in this matter in that they, just like we used to be, are employees with pensions and if at some political point the ever ‘loyal’ Authority decides to ‘let them go’ under a mutual non-disclosure agreement, because that is what it will take to hide this public scandal, it will be an irony of justice that their own pensions, if they manage to retain them, will be frozen until, if ever, they reach their individual age of maturity.

No doubt in their collective smugness, some will shrug their shoulders with the haughty thought, in their personal career damage limitation exercise, that in any event their maladministration and malfeasance will be financially protected by the Limitations Act 1980(Limited to 6 years of debt) in any restitution which they will be required and forced to payback to the disabled FSV, or if now deceased, their estates. Once more they will be wrong.

These Fire Authorities will discover yet another unpleasantness created by their conceited ineptitude which is that the law will offer them no refuge from these underpayment debts simply because they have unjustly enriched themselves by their own errors.

To remove any ambiguity or confusion between what are fraudulent criminal acts and the vain hope that Limitations will provide some form of protection against debts due for reimbursement to FSVs these Fire Authorities should read s32 of the Limitations Act 1980. 

Once more The Bugler provides this for their education.

Go here.

Some of these individual Squires and ‘experts’, ever the self-serving survivalists, in the age-old reflexive response will say to themselves that ‘I am safe’ and that this really has ‘nothing to do with me’. Once more they will be wrong, because there is no Statute of limitations on a criminal act which they have personally perpetrated in this case which is the wholesale defrauding of FSVs of their just enhanced pensions.

Particularly in the light that they have been personally informed in writing that their individual acts are indeed fraudulently criminal and they should cease these acts and, at the very least, make immediate restitution.

Finally, these Squires and ‘experts’ ought to read the personal criminal implications and liabilities for themselves which as lawful citizens they have a duty to avoid by reading the highlighted sections in the Fraud Act 2006 which the Bugler provides for them.

The, ‘I was only doing my duty’(the eternal cry of the guilty) required these Squires and ‘experts’ to act out the moral necessity of reverence for the laws of this State and the laws of natural justice, humanity, and compassion and in these legal, moral, and human virtues these Squires and ‘experts’ have also failed in moral destitution.

So how far exponentially does the Fraud Act 2006 extend its culpability and to whom in this collective case of institutionalised Fraud?

The simple answer to culpability lies in the word ‘acquiesce’ in law which is defined as occurring when a person knowingly stands passively silent without raising an objection when they know the law is being broken or ‘another’s’ legal rights are being infringed.

Culpability therefore extends to all those-top to bottom-who having been informed in writing or made aware of these fraudulent acts have chosen to stand passively by and do nothing in the light of that knowledge.

Those included politically, though this list is not exhaustive, will include the Secretary of State for the DCLG and every single individual elected Councillor on the Lancashire CFA in possession of this knowledge.

Included also are those acting as ‘agents’ of the DCLG, Local Authorities, and Fire Authorities which will include every single employee also in possession of this knowledge, including the Chief Fire Officer.

Lest there be collective and individual doubt in respect of these legal definitions the Bugler, in the infamously disingenuous signing off words of the DCLG civil servants Firefighters Pension Team, suggests that Authorities, individuals, and individual Councillors ‘may wish to seek their own legal advice’ from the CFA’s own two solicitors.

In the Fraud Act ‘another’ has a special meaning which is explained below.

The Bugler, by publishing this Act, and making it immediately available to these Squires and ‘experts’, removes any last vestige of a ‘defence’ of ignorance of the law in that they did not know that they were, and are, acting in a complicit criminal fraud of unjust enrichment on behalf of those whom the Act refers to as ‘another’, namely, the Fire Authority and its Councillors, by jointly not paying the correct ‘enhanced’ pensions due to FSVs. Go Here.