• Fire Service Pension History;

• The 1992 Firemens’ Pension Scheme Order No:129 – Too generous to Firefighters? ;

• Did pension Fair Play ever exist? ;

• The 1992 Scheme is closed at midnight 6th April 2006 to new entrants. Repeated GAD attempts from 2005 to ‘Consolidate’ the 1992 Scheme into a Hybrid Scheme for post  7th April 2006 pension entrants results in failure. The final Edition being sent to the National Archive in 2008 with the resultant administrative melt down in commutation occurring in 2014;

• Obituary-The 2006 Pension Scheme;

• Elections in 2015.

Before looking at the present Fire Service Pension scandal set in the greater context of the current Fire Service management scandals it is necessary to understand a little of the history of UK Fire Service Pension Schemes since shortly after World War I(The Great War); the disbanding of the National Fire Service after World War II; and the transfer of accountability back to Local Authority control in 1947.

After the Great War in 1921 the first imperceptible steps in the recognition of the services of Fire-fighters’ devotion to the Nation and their Communities took place with the introduction of Firemen’s pensions in Local Acts or their inclusion in the 1921 Police Act when some policemen(Fire-Bobbies) were employed either wholly or partly as Fire-fighters.

This was formalised nationally in the 1925 Fire Brigades Pensions Act. Never high on any government’s agenda it was not until the enactment of The Fire Services Act 1947 that the first post WW II major Statutory Scheme was set up under Section 26 of that Act.

As the decades passed the Fire Service Pension Scheme continually evolved in fits and starts influenced more by the parsimonious nature of the government of the day overseeing it rather than the recognition that the Nation and and Communities had a moral and legal  duty of care to Firefighters and their families particularly of those who had

lost their lives or were disabled in the pursuit of their duty to their fellow Citizen.

Key Dates in the History of Firefighters’ Pension Schemes. Go Here.

It was not until the conclusion of the First National Fire Service strike in 1977-78 that the Labour government of the day, as part of the resolution, publicly conceded and recognised how shabbily previous generations of Fire-fighters and their families had been treated in pension terms, particularly those injured in service and those summarily ejected after disablement.

The provision of a new Pension Scheme in 1992, in joint consultation with all representative bodies including employers, went some way to balancing the moral books.

It is interesting to note that the draft Pension Scheme Bill was ‘placed on the table’ in the House of Commons on the 7th February 1992.

It was unopposed and was not debated in Committee Stage nor was it debated in the House, (Page191- Acrobat). Go Here.

So on the 1^st March 1992 the Firemens’ Pension Scheme Order, Statutory Instrument No:129 was placed on the Statute Book.

It is not an Opinion-nor a Commentary-nor a Guide, Statutory Instrument No:129 is the Law. Go Here.

When it was originally published this Statutory Instrument consisted of 89 pages expanding to 116 pages with amendments over the years.

In the main the amendments reflected changing social times in such matters as ‘shared’ pensions(divorce) etc, etc, but in essence (ill-health/Injury) it remained essentially unchanged from 1992 until 2006 for its Members, including those in service today who signed up to it.

After this point in time the S.I. was then consigned to the National Archive where it rests today though still remaining active on the Statute Book until the last Member of the Scheme and/or beneficiary passes away in the late 21^st Century during which time the Government/NJC Employers will have to lawfully and correctly administer it, and pay up! 

A member of the ’92 Scheme on the day you retired?

This Statutory Instrument is applicable to the pension of every Member of the ’92 Scheme for the period from 1^st March 1992 until the 1^st April 2006 and beyond, including those still in service.

So if a Fire-fighter retired through time served/ illness/injury, or by compulsory retirement because of age, during this period these are the specific Statutory terms and conditions which fully apply to his/her pension(s).

The total number of pages of the ’92 Scheme, 89, should be compared to the ‘new’ 2006 Pension Scheme which when first published consisted of only 40 pages.

 It is not necessary to be a genius to conclude from these simple page totals that all the benefits so assiduously fought for, by the ‘old’ FBU Membership with industrial action which included concentrated pension negotiations during which every single word and nuance was the subject of intense scrutiny have simply been ‘blue pencilled’ out by the Government/NJC Employers in their ‘new’ 2006 Pension Scheme; a Scheme’s creation aided and abetted by a distracted ‘new’ FBU leadership during its stampede of greed at the turn of the millennium.

On the 6th April 2004 the old ’92 Scheme was closed to new entrants because the Government/NJC Employers politically decided that, according to them, the Scheme was unaffordable. But in their inimitable ‘don’t panic-can’t run a brewery’ management style they failed to put in place a ‘new’ Scheme before taking this radical step. These are the same group of corporate ‘managers’ who insisted that the Fire Service needed ‘modernising’?

Consequently as the Government/NJC Employers struggled in their self-created mayhem to create and negotiate through a ‘new’ Scheme it discovered to its dismay that it was also required to ‘protect’ the Pension rights of the retired Members of the old ’92 Scheme, and more importantly, those continuing in service but remaining within the ’92 Scheme which would  of course would run late into the 21^st Century.

 Order-counter order-disorder…

 During the period from 6th April 2004, when the Scheme was closed to new entrants, until the 1^st April 2006, certain specific Rights enshrined under the ’92 Scheme came under challenge by the Government/NJC Employers and ironically as a consequence of their greedy actions these Rights became ‘protected’ in law. This means that these Rights in the Scheme cannot be removed, amended, revised, or interpreted by any NJC Employer or Fire Authorities to suit what they would hope it means without Parliamentary approval, but it also means that the Government/NJC Employers will keep on trying which they will…

The Law is the Law and ‘protected rights’ within that Law mean precisely that, ‘Protected’.

Nevertheless ever the greedy opportunists the Government/NJC Employers tried to take advantage of their own chaos and allied with the ‘new’ FBU’s disinterested leadership decided to attempt the emasculation of the pension conditions of those continuing in Service under the ’92 Scheme.

But because of other overarching Statutory Law including the Pensions Act 1995 they were unable to do so, but this did not dissuade them from trying.

 So judging the moment, when the FBU was enthralled by its own propaganda of greed, the Government/NJC Employers finally emerged from its chaos with a nastily detailed agenda in mind which was simple and stark.

 1. They proposed to destroy central negotiations on pay and conditions by returning all such negotiations to local Fire Authorities control under the description ‘Localism’ where,  if possible, there are even more corrupt politicians than in central government.

 2. They would attempt to remove or neuter any legal right which a Member of the ’92 Scheme possessed and in addition eventually they would propose a ‘new’ 2006 Pension Scheme which above all else appealed to individual greed but which would attempt to put the Government/ NJC Employers in complete unbridled autocratic control of any cheapskate ‘localism’ Fire Service Pension Scheme they might come up with later.

 3. The Government/NJC Employers were prepared to do anything in their power including acting unlawfully, if it suited their collective purpose, by changing or disregarding any Rule or legislation(if it could), or ignoring the results of their own Consultation Papers, in order to perpetrate this deliberate mass fraud on its Fire-fighters whether in service or retired.

But their ‘dream ticket’ did not take them entirely to where they intended to go which was back to Dickens and the dark Satanic mills…but they tried.

 4. The Government/NJC Employers in contriving to dismantle the Medical Appeals Procedure proposed that it would unilaterally decide whether or not a Fire-fighter was fit for duty by ‘rearranging the goalposts’ using paid ‘patronage’ Doctors with, if they were fool or corrupt enough, to reach the conclusion they required.

Thus by these actions the Government/NJC Employers would unilaterally decide whether a Fire-fighter was disabled or not; would decide how to ‘redeploy’ this cripple; and would decide his/her employment asset worth and revised downwards salary.

So it was back to the use ‘em, cripple ‘em, throw ‘em on the human scrap heap mentality. Where do they get these ‘people’ from in the 21^st Century?

5. They would do anything amoral or unlawful rather than accept responsibility for a Fire-fighter who had become ill or was permanently disabled in the line of their duty.

The Government/NJC Employers had but one cynical objective in mind namely to save money and if this amoral process defrauded a genuinely ill, injured, or disabled Fire-fighter of the pension they had paid for during their working lives and trusted the Government/NJC Employers and the community they served to deliver if or when the time came, then so be it.

6. Paradoxically, even in this great amoral greedy gouging the Government/NJC Employers intended that Fire-fighters (and in effect their beneficiaries) would remain in service longer until attaining their more expensive(in contributions terms) pension which had barely any semblance of benefits attached to it.

This was, and remains, this Government/NJC Employers’ Utopian dream of scandalous deceit and fraud. The ‘plebs’ are not to have honesty or fair play, or to be treated with the respect they have earned.

In retrospect it is now clear that the ’92 Scheme was to be legislatively disembowelled after 2004 and if that was not achievable then extra interim ‘conditions’ were to be introduced to it which allowed the Government/NJC Employers free rein to make up their own rules as they went along until a ‘new’ Pension Scheme was finally enacted 2006.

But they forgot an essential point, namely to legally amend the S.I.129 (if they could) and thus remove the existing enshrinement of Scheme Members rights in pension Law.

 But they could not amend the law because of overarching legislation which protected millions of other pensioners including Fire-fighters, instead in a great confidence trick they decided to ‘amend’ the 1992 Home Office ‘Commentary’ on the S.I.

But this is hardly the same as amending the law, is it? But the clear intention was to mislead and confuse? More on this later…

  This thorn in their side, the legal protection of rights of Members of the ’92 Scheme, created a conundrum for the NJC Employers of how best to defraud and disenfranchise Members of these paid for and legally enshrined Rights without them knowing they had been so deceived and defrauded.

The keys to a solution were of course to hand and oft used previously. It was the unbridled use of bad faith allied with a gross abuse of Members’ trust.

To achieve this required the systematic misleading and confusing of Scheme Members, those who had little personal knowledge of pension schemes but who implicitly trusted those administering the Schemes to treat them with honesty and fair play.

How foolish of them…

The abuse of this trust with the application of ‘professional’  bad faith has always been a regular feature of pension ‘modernising proposals’. A pernicious evil which lubricates the machinations of Government/NJC Employers, and an abuse which until this moment has lain hidden beneath their decades long layers of sleight-of-hand and deceitful pension fraud.

Paranoia? Here is a simple example of the abuse of trust lubricated by Government/NJC Employers deceit and fraud.

Members of the ’92 Scheme have the Statutory right to remain in service, if they opt to, until their 55^th or 60^th birthday depending on their rank (‘managers’ today).

This legal Right directly conflicts with the Government/NJC Employers objective which is the removal of all ‘expensive’ pension payable benefits whilst forcing Members to work longer using sleight-of-hand to remove or hide the incentive which Members of the Scheme have of increasing their final Average Pensionable Pay(APP), after having served their 30 years, whilst opting to remain in service a further 5 or 10 years until the advent of their compulsory retirement age.

The point was that the Government/NJC Employers as ever wanted their cake and halfpenny.

It expected Fire-Fighters and Officers to remain in service longer whilst enriching the Government/NJC Employers by paying them increased pension contributions whilst denying Scheme Members their Statutory right to remain in service to increase their APP and thus their pension benefit over their final years. A pension benefit which Government/NJC Employers have no intention of honouring.

There is a memorable Latin expression for ’92 Scheme Members which Government/NJC Employers should be regularly challenged with – ‘Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus’-what shall we give in return for so much?…(blood sweat and tears).

To date the Government/NJC Employers’ intended response is… absolutely nothing!

 But there is far more to this issue than just removing a Right to opt to work longer and have this APP reflected in a Member’s final pension benefit. There is the question of what happens to a Member, if after completing 30 years of service and opting to serve on until the age of 55 or 60 the Member falls ill or is injured to the point of permanent disablement during this extended service?

 The answer is very simple. It is already catered for in S.I. 129.

The ’92 Scheme provides the benefit and indeed the mathematical formula within a clearly defined framework of legal fair play by taking the loss of this potential final APP into account when the Government/NJC Employers calculate the Member’s final discharge ill-health/injury pension.

A legal duty and benefit that Government/NJC Employers resolutely fail to implement.

This is an exemplar of Government/NJC Employers fraud in practice and at work today.

In simple language – the Member served 30 years; the Member enjoyed the career; the Member was healthy and committed; the Member wanted and had the Right to continue in service until compulsory retirement age and had opted to do so; the Member opted to do so with the incentive that this initiative would be reflected in their final APP pension benefit; and in addition the Government/NJC Employers had waived their right to compulsorily retire the Member for the ‘efficiency’ of the service.

In other words it was a good deal all around.

This was a continuum of the moral theme that it was not acceptable by any sense of fair play to injure a Fire-fighter in the public service and then throw them uncompensated onto the human scrap heap, particularly after a lifetime of service (30 years) having already been completed.

This issue of compulsory retirement in the ’92 Scheme when taken in isolation is the Government/NJC Employers pension Achilles Heel because try as they might to emasculate it this lawful Right was underpinned and reaffirmed in law on the 21^st November 2005 when the compulsory retirement issue became a ‘protected’ Right for members of the ’92 Scheme.

In other words the right to continue in service to increase a Fire-fighter/Officers APP until their 55^th or 60^th birthday remains with the Member of the Scheme, as does the right to include this element in calculating an III-Health Pension should the Member complete his/her 30 years but fail through ill health or injury to reach their compulsory retirement age.

 This last benefit was the hidden Member’s right which the Government/NJC Employers wished to keep secret and still wish to destroy and because of the ignorance and trust of Scheme members coupled with NJC Employers bad faith many Members have walked away with a substantially reduced pension though actually believing that had been treated fairly!

How is that for bare faced confidence trickery and fraud? 

This is an issue which the Morning Bugler will return to in detail for those in service who need to pay attention to this betrayal which by stealth the Government/NJC Employers in its 2012 ‘proposals’ are back at again.

 For the moment, this deceitful Government and its NJC Employers are between a delightful rock and a hard place of their own making.

Take this scenario for example:

 A ‘92 Scheme Member has a clean disciplinary record; has satisfactory annual performance reviews; has a genuine and good sickness record and he/she has completed their 30 years’ service and has opted to exercise their Right to continue in service until their 55^th or 60^th birthday compulsory discharge age and to continue to pay their pension contributions during this continuation.

On what legal grounds would the Government/NJC Employers elect to discharge this Member on the basis that their continued presence was not conducive to the ‘efficiency’ of the service?

 Later this same Member who has exercised the Right to continue in service and whom the Government/NJC Employers elected to take no positive action to discharge, indeed they had welcomed their continued professional contribution and presence and had received their 11% pension contributions, becomes permanently ill and/or is permanently disabled.

 On what grounds would the Government/NJC Employers deny that Member, who it was happy to have continue in service in the first place, the exercise of their full rights under S.I.129 in respect of the enacted provision for compensation for loss of this potential APP (pension benefit) if for any reason the Scheme Members was unable to serve to the compulsory age of retirement?

The legal answer is of course the Government/NJC Employers must comply with the law of the S.I., and in morality (something which is alien to their collective ‘mind’) cannot be seen in justice to have their cake and halfpenny, can they?

 In summary the ’92 Scheme was introduced and proved to be too good for Fire-fighters particularly those permanently injured in service because the Government/Employers could no longer throw crippled Fire-fighters on the human scrap heap and simply walk away.

In effect Fire-fighters had too many civil and human rights and that simply would not do.

So in panic the Scheme was closed without thought of what might replace it forgetting of course that late entrants to the ’92 Scheme who had potentially either 30 or 40 years’ service ahead of them well into the 21^st Century can and will ultimately enjoy the benefits they signed up to on day one of joining and are happy to pay for, until the time for their richly deserved retirement comes.

 A deal is a deal and a Contract is a Contract particularly if the employers take the pension contributions. In spite of all the weaselling and deceit the Government/NJC Employers engage in. There is little doubt that at one point in the future the Government/NJC Employers will find themselves in the European Court and they will lose because of their bare faced duplicity in their breach of this good faith Contract with their Fire-Fighters.

Dear Reader, if by now you are not as confused as the DCLG intend you to be with its nasty  machinations then you are a smarter Firefighter than they took you for and there is clearly a reserved place for you in Einstein’s old department at Princeton’s University!

But please stay up with their ‘game’ because there is much financial benefit to be gained by understanding your Rights in all these matters particularly if you feel you may be short changed on your ’92 pension in the future or demonstrably have been in the past.

The answer is a qualified yes. The government of the day in 1992(Conservative) whilst reviewing and renewing its ‘Contract’ with its Firefighters had good intentions but the follow through and the ‘policing’ of the Scheme was very poor.

Indeed, somewhere along the way at some administrative level the pension practitioner ‘experts’ stepped in and decided to alter the Rules or simply not implement them fully in full compliance with the law. Naturally this was all to the advantage of their Fire Authorities budgets. No one audited these ‘alterations’ or ‘failures’ or more importantly enforced compliance, a role allocated to the Home Office and now the Firefighters Pension Team of the DCLG with a record as lamentable as any government department ever created. More on this later with another practical example…

It is a fact that the Fire Service, until now, has always fared better under Conservative Governments. The First National Fire Service strike  took place under a Labour Government led by Callaghan and any other ‘modernisation’ of the Service, which virtually destroyed its core values and morale,  were all driven forward by Labour governments under Blair actions which no doubt Neil Kinnock would rightly described as another Labour ‘obscenity’.

 In 1992 the Conservative executive in power level went to extensive lengths to ensure that all those involved with the ’92 Scheme administration, including pension recipients, were clear in plain English what their compliance duties were and what entitlements in law there were for Scheme Members by providing comprehensive simple charts, worked examples, and formulae to be applied to the correctly awarded type of pension(s). It was and remains an idiot proof guide  to the implementation and compliance with the SI but the Departments failed to take into account the ‘professional’ competence of the pension practitioners called on to administer and implement the Scheme.

All that was required in this compliance ‘exercise’ was to decide the correct type of pension(s) to be awarded to the Member; apply the correct and specific calculating formulae provided for that type of pension, all of which would which would result in the Firefighter receiving his/her accurate, honest, and just pension(s).

This simple practice was grounded in law but more importantly on the trust placed in these ‘pension practitioner’s to get the simple sums right. All Firefighters for decades implicitly trusted the honesty and integrity of those who administered their top to bottom pension Scheme and indeed most particularly those who decided and calculated the final pension (s)he would eventually receive.

The average Fire-fighter knew little or nothing about his/her pension nor did he desire to do so. (S)he worked on the presumptive basis that surely these ‘experts’ who worked at pensions day in and day out must surely know what they were doing and based on his/her complete trust in them then (s)he was happy and trustful to let them work it all out.

One of the more ghastly aspects of this pension scandal is the unbridled bad faith and gross breach of that naïve trust by these so called pension practitioner ‘experts’, but as the released records now confirm the Home Office Fire Department also had a role of deception to play in all this by also quietly deceiving the pension practitioner ‘experts’ out in the Fire Authorities it was responsible for. What the HOFD knew or more likely discovered to its financial horror as the Scheme was implemented in practice were secrets best concealed within the Department and indeed from the government of the day. They after all were the authors of this ’92 Scheme.

The great irony often overlooked was that in the actual daily application of the ’92 Statutory Instrument all Scheme Members awarded a pension were utterly powerless at the point of issue of the pension(s) in respect of what type of pension, if any, was to be awarded to them. The Fire Authorities had total power and paradoxically for them the ultimate responsibility when they are found to be in error in determining a pension(s) within the framework of compliance of the Statutory Instrument. Fire-fighters had virtually nothing to do with it.

Certainly pre-retirement Medical Appeals on the percentage of disability awarded could be made by a Fire-Fighter but with the perversity born of years of cynical practice Fire Authorities were accomplished ‘experts’ at defending their position and obfuscating all attempts of those seeking fair play and justice.

However, and there is always a ‘however’, natural justice seems to somehow prevail against this running sore of ‘professional’ corruption, bad faith, and deceit, which naturally leads to institutionalised fraud. Especially when it comes to the point of dispute whether or not a Scheme Member is being paid the correct pension currently, or even since its inception, the tide flows entirely in the opposite direction because in the end ‘game’ the law is the law.

Because the Fire Authorities have such autocratic autonomy in the ‘awarding’ of the pension(s) any and all decisions rest entirely with them and thus the Scheme Member has nothing to prove or be responsible for. It cannot be alleged that the Member was in any shape or form a contributor to any Fire Authority ‘mistake’ subsequently uncovered.

The Fire Authority determines if a pension is payable; the type of pension; they decide(ignoring Appeals for sake of argument) the scale of disability (Injury pension) and whether or not it ought to award the automatically coupled Gratuity etc. The Fire Authority applies and calculates all the formulae appropriate to the class of pension to be awarded and finally it produces a bottom line of payment to the Member.

In short the Fire Authority makes all the decisions and equally they make all the mistakes over which a Member has not the slightest input, control, or responsibility.

All things being equal, and that being the case, one would assume that Fire Authorities, these great paragons of virtue in ‘husbanding’ the public purse, as they remind us ad nauseam, would be meticulous in the application of the Statutory Instrument to each pension using professionally trained actuaries of the highest calibre to calculate and repeatedly check each pension to ensure that it would be accurate to the £ before presenting it to the Member. That is their duty of care to the public purse and ultimately in compliance with the Statutory Instrument their duty of care to the Scheme Member.

But all things are not equal simply because in its usual parsimoniousness the Fire Service failed to appoint professionally qualified ‘practitioners’ to its pension administration and failed to provide the essential revenue budget to support  basic , advanced, and regularly refresher professional actuarial training and education, which ought to lead to the award of a recognised local or national pension practitioners qualification.

The reality is that these pension practitioners are still  ‘trained’ on the job on a ‘monkey see –  monkey do’  a practice and by now policy which continues to this very day.

It is little wonder then that the self-perpetuation of errors, passed down from ‘practitioner’ to practitioner’ over time would naturally magnify and accumulate would then transmute in the minds of these ‘experts’ into unchallengeable and inviolable ‘policies of truth’ and ‘fact’.

How dare a mere Scheme Member  raise a  query with these home brewed, self-educated, self-assured, and self-opinionated ‘experts’ who make up their own rules as they plod along.

So should a Scheme Member retired or in active service trust these ‘experts’ associated with the ‘management’ and payment of their correct pension to do their job properly? The simple answer is no!

But it is insufficient just to express an opinion we must look at and publish the reality of how that trust over the decades has been deliberately misused and abused and has grown into the scandalous ‘Topsy’ which exists today throughout  the UK and its Fire Service ‘administration’ of pensions. Let the facts, statistics, and appalling examples speak for themselves as later we look at…’Rule’ making ‘on the fly’ by these ‘pension experts’.

But as we now find all these years later was, as might be expected, the scales of Justice permanently tilted against the Members of this Scheme by an emasculating small piece of legislation within Rule B3 called Paragraph 5, or so it seems, though appearances can be deceptive.

The 2006 Scheme need not concern ’92 Scheme Members…

At the turn of the millennium this ‘new FBU’ generation, with their ‘chums’ in the ‘New’ Labour Government, were principle movers for ‘new’ pay and conditions including a ‘new’ Pension Scheme actually believing their own propaganda that ‘New’ must be good for their Members and that their Fire-fighter members were actually worthy of a base income of £30k per year (A ludicrous 40% pay rise) at a time when thousands of ‘workers’ were not receiving the National Minimum Wage.

It is such curious beliefs that take lemmings over the cliff…

 Mr.Gilchrist (ex-London FBU) the then FBU General Secretary (a gift to the Government/NJC Employers and the Media) set out on an actual ‘champagne’ trail to the delight of the Red Banner Editors to prove that FBU generations of hard won Fire Service conditions counted for nothing and in conjunction with the gimlet eyed Nick Raynsford MP they both set about ‘modernising’ the Fire Service by boring large holes in it with the resultant disarray the Service is in today.

It is easy to destroy but putting better conditions and advancing mature ‘modernisation’ (a much abused phrase at the time) is another matter as the corpse of the ‘new’ 2006 Pension Scheme remains adrift on a turbulent sea of unfulfilled hopes and industrial action whilst the present 

membership struggles to make headway in the realisation that the FBU ‘leadership’ should have been a whole lot smarter in the first place and were indeed the authors of their own present day misfortunes.

Finally, though it may be hard for Fire-fighters to contemplate the FBU leadership displaying abysmal ignorance of Fire Service pension Schemes agreed to a two tier injury pension.

In practical terms this means that Fire-fighters can only be ‘half’ injured; they could only get half burnt in a flashover; only half a wall would fall on them; they could only ‘half’ run out of air on their breathing apparatus; then they could only get ‘half’ lost; and ‘half’ die.

How the NJC Employers must have chortled on their way to the bank…

 The golden rule, that the naïve and inexperienced FBU boys and girls of the Executive of today need to learn, is that when the Government of the day; the NJC Employers; and their ‘30 pieces of silver’ Chief Fire Officers bring forward proposals for change of conditions the FBU and others should as a matter of routine head for the bunkers and prepare for hostilities because any proposals they make are certainly not going to be in their Members interests.

It is also time to mobilise the votes for the next European elections in 2014 and the next General Election in 2015.

Put bluntly, brass necked fraud is the objective of today’s Government and their NJC Employers. They have not the ‘decency of a thief’ to attempt to disguise it, but for whatever comfort it may bring at this stage there will be Elections in 2014 (May-Europe) and a General Election in May 2015 so it will pay to observe those in Ministerial Posts and the Party from whence they come and how they have acted in respect of their Fire-fighters and their Contract with them when it comes time to cast your electoral vote.

Do Fire-fighters retired or in service have sufficient political muscle to make an impact on these Parties who will shortly be courting your vote? The answer is, yes.

There are 35,445 personnel serving in the current Fire Service;  this allied with 38,855 retired Fire Service Veterans within the ’92 Scheme and 643 in the 2006 Scheme a grand total of 39,498 ; and all x 3 representing their beneficiaries(families), but excluding those whom they may wish to influence from a voting perspective, nevertheless together create a collective total of a approximately quarter of a million voters…

That buys influence and the right to be heard and treated fairly and with the respect sorely earned.

It seems likely, in the present uninspiring limpid political climate that there will be more marginal seats at the next General Election rather than less, and as a consequence it also seems likely that a ‘rainbow’ coalition government will be result in 2015.

In this climate of political uncertainty every vote is valuable and counts and buys more than it normally would. So sell it carefully and at a handsome price. The NJC Employers would.

It seems logical to The Morning Bugler that these votes should be cast in favour of the Party; or  Parties; or the Independents who have not only acted with a decent moral compass in this pension scandal but have also acted with an innate sense of fair play in its dealing with the ’92 Scheme members, their beneficiaries, and those still in service with their potential beneficiaries.

 Now is the time for all political parties to pragmatically demonstrate their answer to the question Fire-fighters retired and serving are asking them now and will continue to ask until the next General Election … Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus… ‘what shall we give in return for so much ?’ (blood, sweat, and tears).