THE Police Federation of England and Wales has stood by its decision to impose a majority threshold on the industrial rights ballot.<\/p>\n
Ian Rennie, general secretary, (pictured) insisted the Joint Central Committee had made the right decision \u00a0to impose a fifty-per-cent-plus-one threshold.<\/p>\n
A conference debate heard the national Federation being accused of setting an \u201cunnecessarily high\u201d threshold.<\/p>\n
Paul Deller, general secretary of the Met Federation Constables\u2019 Branch Board, said it was \u201cappalling\u201d that the Federation did not view the ballot as a democratic election, through which a first-past-the-post voting system would have resulted in the Federation pursuing industrial rights.<\/p>\n
During the ballot in February, 56,333 Police Federation members voted \u2013 roughly 42 per cent of the overall number of members in England and Wales. A total of 46,651 were in favour of the Federation seeking industrial rights and 10,681 were against.<\/p>\n
Despite the overwhelming majority of voters favouring radical action, the national Federation has maintained that they would need a majority of their 133,108 members to vote in favour to pursue such a fundamental change in officers\u2019 status as Crown Servants.<\/p>\n
Mr Rennie acknowledged that the results showed \u201cjust how strongly many of our members feel about the way they have been treated by this government\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, he said: \u201cTo seek such a change supported by only a minority of the membership would have left us open to challenge both inside and outside of the organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWhilst many members might be disappointed with the results of the ballot, we must not lose sight of the fact that more than half \u2013 58 per cent \u2013 of our members did not vote. It is not possible to establish whether this was because they had declined to vote or were not bothered by the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Rennie received support from many delegates in the room, including Steve Fraser, from Avon and Somerset Constabulary, who said he would be \u201cabsolutely appalled\u201d if less than half of the membership voted for industrial rights and the Federation went along with it when the majority did not want it or did not make it clear that they wanted it.<\/p>\n
Mr Rennie concluded: \u201cI still believe that we as an organisation got this right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE Police Federation of England and Wales has stood by its decision to impose a majority threshold on the industrial rights ballot. Ian Rennie, general secretary, (pictured) insisted the Joint\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}