Hull City Council Cuts? .... Hire a Tobacco Control Officer!

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

This post is obviously aimed at an ex-policeman. The mentality and methodology of Hull City Councils Trading Standards is straight out of the Inspector Clouseau School of Investigation:-



"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!