Month: November 2020

As someone spotted in the comments section, the person in charge of the dreamfund (which we have received numerous complaints about – regarding money promised never turning up) has been caught trying to steal donuts from a Tesco Extra in Wisbech. This was in a police uniform, on his day job as a Cambridgeshire PC. This is just the latest case of a cop being less than above board whilst working for LR. We can think of at least 3 others right now – dishonesty, misrepresentation, fraud and ignoring illegality for conveniences’ sake. Anyone who has served with integrity in any organisation should be thoroughly disgusted by this kind of behaviour.

The worst news for all of us is that he appears in Lowland Rescue uniform on the pages of most of the national papers, and all of the local ones. The BBC also covers the story and shows The Pieman in LR hiviz, over his special ops covert tactical black. This picture appears in The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Times and The Mirror. There is a professional standards hearing this week, with Cambridgeshire Police stating that this “brings discredit upon the police service and undermines confidence in it because a reasonable member of the public, aware of all the facts, would be justifiably appalled that a police officer had acted dishonestly and without integrity”.

The questions remaining are:-

1. Will LR consider this to be bringing the charity into disrepute? It should beggar belief that the police can sanction someone for dishonesty and LR would turn a blind eye. However, there are sadly numerous cases of people doing the wrong thing in and out of LR uniform and being actually rewarded, so maybe don’t hold your breath.

• Does this explain where some or all the dreamfund money went? Or was that spent on legal fees,  trying to stitch up the previous chairman? Or a bit of both? A report was commissioned and promised when Dr Piers Page & James Rossell were booted out into what they did with all the cash, but so far this has been quietly buried. Some transparency would certainly put all the rumours / remaining questions to bed here…

It is SURSAR’s tenth anniversary which is commendable, however a not so perfect 10 they also achieved this year was the Trustees have tried to hush up that they spent £10k of donated money on barristers & legal fees trying to cover their mistakes and dishonesty when dealing with a volunteer.

The Trustees knew they could never win yet proceeded at the charity’s expense and misled the Membership as to its necessity and progress. The matter could and should have been sorted out without resorting to barristers, however the Trustees were too arrogant, reckless and foolish to accept this and proceeded with an unwinnable claim.

Its not the first time charity money has been wasted on legal fees. Lets not forget that the Trustees of SURSAR did the same thing when acting as Trustees at Lowland Rescue at national level, spending thousands of pounds on a bogus legal case to try to oust the former chairman by making unfounded allegations.

Dr Piers Page and James Rossell were subsequently accused of fraud and theft by Lowland Rescue and had to step down. As usual Lowland Rescue are keeping quiet about this as they obviously don’t want the public or the members of the charities involved to know donations given in good faith are being spent on legal fees and not where intended. They too are keeping quiet about just how much was spent.

Presumably the Governors of the charities involved are happy for this level of spending to cover accusations of incompetence and fraud…

When people donate to SAR they expect the money to be used on equipment/repairs and running costs and not on legal fees where it would serve no purpose or benefit the charity. Families of the people who Surrey SAR have helped look for need to be asking to see the accounts to see where the money they raised really went and challenge the false promises that were made to them about how the money would be used. In fact anyone who has donated to SurSAR should be concerned about how their donation was used.

Over £17k was raised last year from supermarkets alone, not to mention the money raised by many other people who did charity fundraising events. Despite this they still had a £20k deficit and to spend £10k on legal fees is nothing short of a disgraceful mismanagement of charity funds.

The membership and public need to question whether the Trustees can be trusted. There needs to be constitutional change at Surrey SAR as Trustees should never be part of the management team as there is simply no accountability over management decisions regarding spending and leads to year on year financial deficits.

As long as Dr Piers Page, James Rossell and Seamus Kearns are Trustees the charity funds will always be mismanaged. One only has to look at their social media to see that despite financial deficits year after year with Dr Piers Page as Chairman they continue to buy an excessive amount of vehicles, each of which has running costs and are rarely used for SAR purposes due to the low level of callouts. It is hardly surprising that money is being haemorrhaged.

Surrey SAR Trustees could always do the sensible option which is to not break the law in the first place, that would help keep legal costs to zero as they historically were when it was a run as a friendly charity and not the pseudo business it is now. Your Victim Card has been declined.