Based in the Trading Standards Service, the post will involve working closely with partners in other enforcement agencies to reduce illicit and underage sales of tobacco through improving the quantity and quality of local information on such sales and through targeted initiatives. This will help to reduce the high smoking prevalence in the area and create a healthier city.
You will have a relevant qualification that includes a substantial element of information gathering and legal compliance training, including knowledge of relevant codes of practice relating to investigations and prosecutions. You should also have proven experience working in a multi agency enforcement or intelligence gathering environment.
You should be a good communicator and be able to establish effective working relationships with a wide range of partners. You also need to be approachable and able to communicate with retailers and the public with tact and diplomacy.
This is a new post and the postholder should have the ability to develop new solutions and approaches where there are little or no precedents.
Shortlisting: 2 September
Interviews: w/c 12 September
Interviews: w/c 12 September
"Mr Parkin also revealed officials had carried out a survey of discarded cigarette packets at Hull Fair in an attempt to find out the extent counterfeit and smuggled tobacco in the city."
One has to wonder at the sanity of these people. Hull Fair is the biggest fair in the UK and attracts tens of thousands of visitors from all over Yorkshire, lt is also next to the football stadium that averaged over 25,000 supporters a week, plus it's home to the Hull FC rugby club averaging another 14,000 a week. Away supporters go to the fair.
Plus Hull is a large seaport with ferries running daily to and from Belgium and Holland. Not forgetting either that many of Hulls large population take their holidays abroad and purchase tobacco there.
So Hull City Trading Standards spend a week searching through all the rubbish from Hull Fair to find discarded cigarette packets with foreign writing on them. From this they expect to extrapolate meaningful figures on smuggled and counterfeit tobacco. FFS ... they're insane.
Now they are hiring a fulltime Tobacco Control Officer at £22-25k a year .... just in time for Hull Fair. lt arrives in Oct.
Beam me up Scotty!
You have to love political correctness
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't say if smokers can apply.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't insanity, this is a rent-seeking, empire-building semi-public body on the make. To gain extra funding, they have to make the tobacco "smuggling" problem look worse than it actually is, to exaggerate the amount of duty the taxman is losing. If the problem looks huge and growing, then funding a very special form of plod to try to cope with it makes sense (for strange, twisted versions of "sense").
ReplyDeleteSo, if you look at the numbers of foreign ciggie packets discarded at, say, a rural agricultural show in the middle of England, the percentage is going to be microscopic and demonstrate a clear lack of a problem.
If however you look at the rubbish seen at a busy seaport with good, cheap links to the continent, then obviously there'll be way more people smoking cheap foreign ciggies since if you can get cheap stuff, smoking expensive ones is utterly stupid. Hull Fair will therefore give a completely false picture of how many foreign ciggies are smoked in the UK.
This will clearly demonstrate an enormous problem, for which UKBA will need enormous funding to try to cope with. That or an outbreak of common sense in Government, and the sharp reduction of duty on ciggies to make smuggling much less profitable...
It's not their money - what do they care? Spunk it around - waste it while you have it. Squander it. Burn it. There's always more to go around.
ReplyDelete@Dr Dan
Were/are you a Monk?
l've lived in Hull all my life and worked on the docks since l was 16, l am now retired. We all got "deals" of one sort or another from the docks.
ReplyDeleteA lot of them came from HM Customs (now called UKBA). They are still doing it.
Perhaps this new Tobacco Control Officer should start there?
We pay Police and Customs to do this job so wtf do Hull Council want with a retired plod on their payroll for?
ReplyDeleteCan anyone see this ex plods work saving the government 25k a year in lost taxes? Not an f'ing chance!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-14750703
ReplyDeleteMore anti-smoking waste of money in Hull
Aye, Mr_Rothmans, I was and am still a resident of the Monastery, occasionally posting, more often lurking.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, I am not going to explain the meaning of the above to the unclued. Either you know, or you don't need to know. And I'll not mention The Chicken more than in passing, either.
SH, you should apply...
ReplyDelete..'make the poacher to the game keeper'
You could be our mole, feeding the Marquis with the Nazi's plans.
w/v 'protesse'
Unless the new Labour run council cancelled the recruitment freeze (and let's face it that is possible) for this job to be advertised it would have to have been authorised at the highest levels in the council ( probably the deputy chief executive) having spent time in the presence of these people over the years the Hull fair bit does not surprise me - you should have seen the really barnpot ideas the last lib Dem council stopped happening!
ReplyDeleteThis is good job I am thinking for
ReplyDeleteme having many experience in
East Germany bis 1989 when the
wall is coming down.I was in good
job shooting criminals and gangsters people who trie to get to
capitalist west Finding the criminal smoking people will be very nice as they are standing
outside the drinking houses like
grosse ArscheLocher.
What is strange ,the DummKopfe
people of the Hull place are voting for this Rathaus
Lebens Raum
ls this ex-plod going undercover and visiting the numerous ethnic shops down Spring Bank, Holderness Rd? l'm sure he won't be spotted :)
ReplyDeletels he going into the pubs and asking to buy tobacco from the locals who know each. l'm sure he won't be spotted :)
lt'll be interesting to see his 'results' after a year. :)
Maybe the Police will employ someone to replace bulbs in Hull's street lamps, and Revenue & Customs will create a task force to repair those potholes?
ReplyDeleteOh, and as the claimed purpose of this new post is to make the city healthier, perhaps the NHS will reciprocate by helping to staff the city libraries?
As Dr Dan says, it's just empire-building. It's not what people expect to pay council tax for.
But as far as the council is concerned, it's free money. Plenty more where that came from. Anyone who won't pay, goes to jail.