Report - Fire Brigades Union

Section
Legal report
Last year the union secured £3.5m in compensation for
members and their families injured at and away from work.
Pensions
Retained firefighter pensions
Following the FBU’s success in the House of Lords and at the
employment tribunal in the test cases, agreement on the
principles of the pensions settlement and the terms and
conditions has been reached. The terms and conditions
settlement is due to be signed and the draft statutory
instrument necessary for the pensions settlement is expected
to be published shortly.
Surrey pension judicial review
The union appealed to the Board of Medical Referees (BMR)
on this matter. The board allowed a member’s pension to be
reduced on a Rule K review by apportioning part of their
disablement to not-due-to-service injuries.
On the FBU’s instructions, a judicial review of that decision
was sought. Both the department for Communities and Local
Government (CLG) and Surrey FRA agreed that it was not
lawful to allow apportionment on review in a case where the
entirety of the disablement had been assessed as having been
caused by service-related injury in the first instance.
Judicial approval of this agreement between the parties has
now been obtained.
Employment
Freedom of expression
The FBU and Thompsons solicitors secured a ground-breaking
victory for a member who was sacked by Greater Manchester
fire and rescue authority for sending an email to colleagues
about the fire service’s insistence that he used a chair that was
injuring his back on nightshifts at work.
After a seven-day hearing in June and September 2009, the
employment tribunal concluded that the member’s right to
freedom of expression under the Human Rights Act had been
breached and that his dismissal was unfair.
This year Thompsons secured an out-of-court settlement of
£80,000, which is more than the statutory cap for these types
of cases.
Continual professional development payments
The employment appeal tribunal (EAT) has dismissed the
appeal by South Yorkshire fire and rescue authority (SYFRA)
against a ruling that it unlawfully deducted £915 each from the
wages of four FBU members when it turned them down for
continual professional development (CPD) payments under the
scheme introduced in 2007.
The EAT ruled, as did the employment tribunal, that it was a
breach of contract for SYFRA to refuse to pay a CPD payment
just because the published sickness absence target had been
exceeded.
It was held that the CPD payment was not simply an
attendance bonus. The wording of the CPD scheme required
an assessment to be made of a firefighter’s commitment to
attendance. So a firefighter who normally has a good sickness
FBU Annual Report 2011 97