Chair's message January 2020

8 January 2020

New Year Message

Benevolent Fund Help
Over a dozen of you have been helped in the run up to Christmas by the Benevolent Funds food voucher offer. We are really grateful for the speed with which they were able to help officers. Some officers who asked for vouchers went on to make further claims on the fund and received even more help. Its great work and we are happy to say it’s being extended into January.
You DO need to be a serving officer to benefit from this scheme which you can access simply by sending me a message, either on Facebook or email. Once we are in touch we can then have a chat over the phone to arrange a convenient time to meet in person. It’s that straight forward. We know it may be a difficult thing for some to ask, but it’s confidential and help could just be a message away, so if you think you might need a bit of help this month, please drop us a line.

Bravery 2020
Plans are forging ahead for the first Essex Federation Bravery Awards to be held in April. Our aim is to recognise more of you our members, and the brave acts you undertake on a daily basis, culminating in our nominee for the National Bravery Awards being announced.
Those who have been commended or otherwise officially recognised for bravery in 2019 are already in consideration but if you know of an incident you think is worthy of recognition and aren’t sure if it’s been recognised or not, please just drop me an email at steve.taylor@polfed.org and I can look into it.

New MP’s
The recent national election saw Essex return all 18 of its previous Conservative Members of Parliament. We have made contact with them all intending to continue our relationship with them on your behalf. We update them on national and local efforts which they might be able to support and which the Federation are pushing, such as:
• Police Covenant – Very similar to the Military Covenant, we are seeking to enshrine in law the forces responsibility to the health and welfare of officers. We seek to tie up a number of police charities working in this area and help secure funding from government to do so.
• Specials – We are lobbing for Specials to be allowed to join the Federation. For too long, while facing the very same risks as regular officers, our specials have been second class when it comes to rights and representation. We want to see them allowed admission to the Fed and what that looks like re subs. Clearly these need to be paid, just the same as a regular officer, and we are pushing for this to be done by the PFCC as specials are volunteers.

And finally….
Thanks for your support over this last year. With the exception of myself, Paul, Stu and Laura in the office, the rest of your Fed reps are all volunteers. They give their time to support you, but without understanding supervisors and colleagues picking up the slack when we are off doing Federation work, it would be far harder than it needs to be.
We wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year.

Your Chair