Related Articles
More firefighters blaming the county council for missing out on their pension have come forward.
It comes after Alan Clements, who worked as a retained firefighter at the Egremont station for 35 years, spoke out on the matter.
He said that when the Government agreed to give people in such roles a pension, he missed out on the opportunity due to the county council failing to send him the relevant paperwork communication offering him the pension, meaning he missed the deadline to apply.
Now Tony Sewell, a former watch manager at Whitehaven, and Les Finley, former watch manager at Frizington, said the same happened to them.
Mr Sewell, 57, of Whitehaven, said: “Exactly the same thing happened to me.
“The problem was I didn’t know anything about the pension until somebody else told me they got it. I was with Cumbria Fire and Rescue Service for 25 years.
“Apparently what the council was saying in the letters is ‘do you want a pension’, who in their right mind would turn that down? If I’d had the letter I would have acted on it.
“What upsets me is the belligerence of not admitting that either the council or Royal Mail could have made a mistake, it feels like theft.”
Mr Finley, 55, of Cleator Moor, said: “I have been in service from 1990 to 2014 and I never had a letter either.
“To be honest the council’s email system was always problematic, but this shouldn’t have penalised me.
“The pension would have been a bit of recognition for the commitment on our part. Without retained firefighters, the service could not run in Cumbria.
“I think of all the days I wanted to do things with my family and didn’t in case something happened and I was called out, it wasn’t just me who was on call, in a way it was all my family.”
A spokesman for the county council said: “In accordance with the guidance all eligible individuals were sent correspondence to their home addresses that we had on record on April 30, 2014. This letter stated that a response was required by June 30, 2014 and if a response was not received by this date, the opportunity to join the modified scheme would be lost. This letter was sent out as part of a batch of 643 letters done as a Mail Merge and the Service received 233 responses to these letters before the specified deadline. If the Service had not received a response, a reminder email was sent to the individual’s work email address on June 12, 2014, again stating that a response was required by 30 June 2014 and that the Service would not be sending out any further correspondence on the matter. ”
