Dear Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service,
I would like to pose the following two questions:

1) In your accounts of 2013/2014, on page 52, reference is made to an exit package for the early retirement* of a DCFO, on a salary of £115,898/annum, only for you to immediately promote someone else into the same post, on a salary of £108,655/annum, what was the justification for doing this and what was the cost saving produced by carrying out this particular exit and promotion process?

2) If there was no cost savings then what was the rationale for providing an exit package for this individual?

I would like you to note that the given salary, for the newly promoted DCFO, was £111,358 in your accounts of 2014/2015 and it increased to £118,360, as recorded in the accounts of 2015/2016. The prematurely retired DCFO could have served three additional years, until reaching 30 years of service in January 2017, and would still have been under the NPA (normal pension age) of 55. This three additional years of service of the prematurely retired DCFO would have had nil cost implications to SFRS.

* after 27 years of service.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Moss

Dear Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service's handling of my FOI request 'What was the cost saving of paying off one DCFO, in early 2014, only to promote someone to the same post on almost the same salary?'.

I would like an answer to this question as it is in the public interest. Your accounts of 2013/2014 identify the DCFO as being given an exit package. I am familiar with the alleged rationale for this departure from the time but I cannot accept this. If a management restructure was carried out as a cost saving measure, I would like to know what the cost saving measure was in specifically offering an incentivised exit package to a senior officer to cause them to leave 3 years prematurely only to immediately employ someone in exactly the same post, and on almost identical pay. There were no costs to be saved in the incentivised early departure of this person and if that is the story being promulgated by a public service then members of the public ought to be entitled to ask. To characterise this question as broadly similar to another question is, in my opinion, a deliberate attempt to conceal the information sought.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

Yours faithfully,

Robert Moss