Thank you BankFodder for your help in re-opening the thread! Just a small update about this. Thanks to everyone again for your very helpful advice. The reason I never reported back was because a settlement was reached with my now-former employer regarding this matter. I am not allowed to talk about the terms of the settlement, and I was not allowed to mention its very existence for 4 years (hence now I can reveal that, and finally tell my ex-colleagues and friends the truth). But I can say that you helped me in doing this, so thank you genuinely for that, as there were a number of things I would not have thought of without your comments, which helped me in reaching the solution! Have a great day all.

Thank you for the helpful replies. I will do the formal grievance then. In the building are about 500 employees. There are six of us in my office.

Hi all, thanks in advance for reading and any advice. I'll try to be as concise as possible. I have an iPhone provided by my work. It states on the iPhone Policy that if you lose the phone or it is stolen, you will have the price of the iPhone taken off the next payslip. The only exception is if you can provide a police certificate that it was stolen, but there is a sub-exception here that states you still have to pay if the theft was facilitated to clear negligence on your part, e.g. leaving it unsupervised in a public place. In November 2015 there was a fire drill at work. I immediately left the building. When the drill ended and I returned to my office, my work phone had been stolen off my desk. When I informed Asset Management of the theft, the person at the desk seemed understanding and stated verbally that this should be OK and I shouldn't be charged as when there is a fire drill, you must leave immediately and not stop to pick up personal belongings. I was provided with a new work phone a few days later and there were no other comments made by them. Come end of November, I have £300 taken off my payslip for the cost of a new iPhone 5. Before even considering whether they can do this, the price is not right. They currently retail on Amazon at £251, and I strongly suspect my employer gets them at a far lower price seeing as they order hundreds for their employees. So they are making a profit on this. By email, I questioned the deduction (and the price). In their email reply, they didn't dispute my story but said I was negligent as I should have taken the phone with me. I pointed to the fire regulations, which state, word for word: "...evacuate the building immediately and do not stop for any personal belongings. Delaying the evacuation to gather personal belongings risks the lives of you and your colleagues and may constitute gross misconduct." Their reply to this was that it was "obvious" that small items like your phone don't count in this rule, as your phone will be sitting on your desk (where we have a dedicated power cable for our phones) and so you will lose no time in picking it up. And they said making a police report for theft is pointless as it was now "too long ago" and in any case I was negligent (see 1st para.). I also raised the fact that there is CCTV - not in my office, but in the hall adjoining it. I.e. my office door is in clear view of the camera, so can see everyone who enters or leaves the office. This is the only door to the office. Even if the phone isn't recovered, I told them they can at least find out who stole it, on a matter of principle/ethics. They replied "data protection" and were extremely obstructive. What's the point of CCTV in this location if not to stop things being stolen from the premises or find the people who do steal? I issued a written reply by recorded delivery, challenging the deduction by quoting the fire regulations and stating that no exceptions are listed. I received no reply. I waited for my December payslip and there was no £300 refund. Where do I stand here? I was simply following the fire regulations. I am not in a trade union. Would CAB be a good start? Could I also claim interest on the money they are withholding from me? I have been careful not to mention legal threats as I know most people who say this never act on it. I am now at the stage where I would be happy to leave/lose my job to fight this. Threatening with going to the press would be futile as they are a very large company that has had a few controversies in the past and couldn't care less about negative coverage. Even if I can't get a refund on the facts, can I challenge the amount that they deducted as it is considerably more than the retail value of the phone? Thanks in advance, sorry for the long post!

Thanks everyone for the clarification. Have a wonderful day!

Hello, This is not an individual query about an invoice, just a general question about why the CAG experts' advice on parking charges has done a complete U-turn from what it used to be. A few years ago, the blanket advice was "ignore, ignore, ignore" "do not enter into communication with the PPC", etc. Why are the instructions now the complete opposite? Is it because of POFA or did some PPC manage to win against an "ignoring" person when in the past it was thought this was impossible? Thanks, Tom

Sorry, deleting temporarily as I don't want to be identified. Moderators feel free to delete this post/thread.

I'm going to London next week, unfortunately I have no option but to take the car. I'm aware of the situation regarding PPCs and how the tickets in supermarket car parks are unenforceable, indeed I have received 2 of these invoices in the past and have ignored them with no consequences. I'll be using the parking facilities at the B&B but on the day I check out I will be spending several hours in Central London before travelling home. Obviously it would not be fair to carry on parking at the B&B after having left. Is there anything wrong with finding the nearest Tescos and parking there? Are PPCs in London more aggressive e.g. do you have clamping? I can imagine if everyone driving in London knew about the reality of PPCs then the supermarkets car parks would be overwhelmed. I would never think twice of doing this in most places but can't believe it's that easy in London. Anyone? Thanks.

Indeed that's a lie (no surprises there as it came from the police) - any caution or conviction will turn up on either type of CRB check for the rest of your life, no ifs or buts. I don't know where the 6 years figure came from, they plucked that out of thin air. Cautions are spent immediately, i.e. you do not have to declare it (except for jobs exempt from the ROOA). The time period for being spent depends on the sentence btw. Cautions = spent immediately. Fine, probation, other non-custodial sentence etc. = 5 years. Prison sentence (including suspended) of 6 months or less = 7 years. Prison sentence (including suspended) of 6 to 30 months = 10 years. Longer prison sentence = never spent. This is unambiguous and has no exceptions, these times are out in law by the ROOA and cannot be changed by a judge or probation. If the conviction came before your 18th birthday, all the aforementioned spent time periods are halved.

The word "caution" is difficult because it means several different things. When you are at the nick and the police are reading you your rights "...if you fail to mention anything in evidence which you may later rely on in court..." etc. that's called the caution. As already said, this could result in prosecution and if convicted there will most likely be a fine, and you will have to declare you have a criminal conviction for 5 years after the date of conviction. That is different from a police caution is what they give you if you have committed a minor offence but they don't deem it serious enough to prosecute. If this is the case, you do not have a conviction, you were not prosecuted and you do not have to say on any job/insurance forms. etc that you have a criminal conviction as police cautions are "spent" immediately. However, it will come up on any CRB check you may have to do in future (but this is only for a select few jobs e.g. any work with children, the law, medical, national security, senior finance jobs). You would have received some kind of official documentation from the police if it was a police caution, and the matter would be considered closed. If it was the other kind of caution, then as has been said, watch this space. The vocabulary really does need to be changed regarding this as it is quite confusing - probably deliberately so in order to make serious offenders believe they are getting away with a police caution.

That's an interesting conclusion, especially the bit where he wasn't assigned blame just because he didn't admit to it! There are accidents every day where the driver at fault refuses to accept blame but still get assigned it by the insurance as a fault claim.

bump

You knew about the obstruction, but you still made the decision to drive out despite being aware of the high risk of damage. If you crash into a stationary object, it is only yourself to blame. Sorry.

(Mods feel free to move this if there is a better place to put it, thanks) I made a Freedom of Information Request to Devon and Cornwall Police (my local force). I thought that your request is treated confidentially? I.e. the information (if the request is successful) is published for all to see, but the identity of the requestor is not revealed. Correct me if I'm wrong. Now I have learnt the local beat officers, who have nothing to do with FOI, are aware of my request. It revealed some information which reflects badly on the force, by the way. But it seems the Freedom of Information Officer has gone and revealed my identity and personal information to other police officers who have nothing to do with it. I have checked the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and can't find anything about confidentiality so I'm a bit stuck. I have no complaints how the actual request has been dealt with, but I'd like to know if any rule has been breached by gossiping about the people making requests to other people who don't need to know. I wrongly thought the FOI officer would keep that to themselves.

Hi, I was unsure which forum to put this in, please feel free to move it if there is somewhere more appropriate that I haven't spotted... I would like to make a Freedom of Information Act request to a number of police forces in the south-west of England. I would like to know if the fact that I have made a request will enter the Police National Computer, or if the fact that I made a request from the police will come up on any future CRB checks I might have to do. If it's relevant, I do have a criminal record for a single, isolated offence, which is not yet spent. I just don't want the police seeing that I am on their files and then adding the fact that I have requested information from them to those files. Thanks for any help.

I also would have insisted on a trial for that one! But there are some "sex" offences, especially computer related, and involving strict liability, where people regularly have no choice but to plead guilty to something they haven't done. A typical example is the very unpleasant charge of possession of indecent images, you know what I mean...where simply having them is an offence and there is very little defence to it. A defence is that you didn't know they were on your computer or on your internet history (you DON'T have to have saved them, you only need to have SEEN them on the screen, even if involuntarily). Many people I have dealt with via the Probation Service are honest citizens who have found images of this nature, and have gone straight to the police about it, believing they were helping. But now the police can say they DID know about them because they told the police about them. They will charge you in 90% of these cases. This is because they are not bothered about stopping abuse and finding the real people behind this unspeakable crime, but they are happy to get an easy and blatantly unjust conviction as it boosts their statistics. If you are unfortunate enough to have something like this pop up on your screen, do NOT tell the police. Seriously consider destroying your computer, as the police's programs may have detected it and there will be a knock at your door, any time between a day and several years in the future. Things like this will normally only pop up if you are on a fairly dodgy but not illegal porn website, but still, it's not illegal, so it's not fair that law-abiding people get dragged into this mess. Sorry to go off topic but it's important! As such, CRB checks are often meaningless because there are so many people who are either not guilty of the crime, or who are guilty in law (through strict liability) but innocent in fact and deed. Then there are those who are truly guilty but whose crimes are completely irrelevant to the job in question and who are absolutely no more of a liability/risk than any other applicant with a clean record. Then you get the tens of thousands of people whose CRB checks have come up wrong and they have been labelled someone they are not, normally due to having the same name or date of birth as someone with a long criminal record.