Sara Morrison vs Belfast Film Festival - Thread 2

[TwoLoonsAndASprout]

Continuation of previous thread - don’t have all the details to hand to add here, so if someone can pop them on, pls do! Want to get this up quickly!

What is really interesting that Would-U-Like group did not exist in that name at the time the grant was paid to them as the filing shows a start date of 22 September 2004 when it had the name Sarcon whereas the (admittedly small) grant was paid in the 2003/4 financial year - so between April 2003 and March 2004.

There also seems to be something very strange about Sarcon/Would-U-Like as 6 months after it was set up all of the directors resigned on 9 May 2005 and 2 new directors were appointed - Deborah Boyd and Trevor Boyd.

It says on the companies house form that a serving director must sign the form to confirm the appointment of the new director - only she signed both places to appoint herself

Deborah Boyd's organisations continued to get grants from Invest Northern Ireland eg 2005-6
Deborah Boyd was a Board member of Enterprising Women Network (Armagh and Portadown) to September 2005, which received £8,000 (2005: nil) of financial assistance payments from Invest NI. - annual report p.119

2006-7
What struck me here was her bio information. In 2006-7 she would have been 45-46 - yet is says she has been sitting on Employment tribunals for almost 20 years - so since her mid 20s? Does that make sense for someone with no relevant legal/HR experience? She seems to have a lot of experience sitting on boards (DoE, CBI, IBEC) and a lot of directorships (mostly dissolved companies) but no academic/professional qualifications are listed - not using her "Professor" title either - annual report p.23

From the re3 website:

'Professor Deborah Boyd
Chief Executive Officer

A co-founder, director and shareholder of the Re3 Group, Professor Deborah Boyd is an expert in waste management technologies and implementation. Professor Boyd is also a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, and Environmental Tutor at Queens University of Belfast and has been a member of several public body advisory panels and was a founding member of the IBEC/CBI Joint Council.'

So, University of Ulster visiting Professor. 'Also' (Also to what?) Apparently.

It would be very unlikely she has been there 20 years in that timeframe ie appointed in her 20s.

That would give her 40 years current experience.

I feel a FoI request about appointment dates of Tribunal members and qualification process of their CV coming on.

I pinpointed an appointment date of 1 Jan 1990, so 35 years. Which would make her one of the longest serving lay members, maybe the longest serving - I don't have a current list of panel members.

Appointment at age 30 or thereabouts is not implausible if you give a good interview. There were a lot more panel members back then, and I assume the 1989 competition was recruiting in bulk.

I've no idea if there would be any surviving documentation from back then. For judiciary probably, but lay members are in the twilight zone.

And yet... Googling Deborah Boyd, University of Ulster comes up with diddly squat for me.

She was appointed on New Year's Day?

Eh?

Ok. I am now willing to place a bet that DB is not a professor in any meaningful sense of the word. And probably rather shady. And shouldn't be on an ET panel.

Deborah - if I'm wrong, apologies. Would love to hear from you to set me straight.

1 January will be the formal start date of the term of appointment. So the actual decision to appoint will have been taken in 1989, and her first working day as a panel member will have been whenever the listing team scheduled her for a hearing.

Start dates of 1 Jan and end dates of 31 Dec are quite common in the public appointments world.

It doesn't mean that the relevant Minister (this would be a direct rule Minister under the Thatcher government, wild to think it) was doing boxes on New Year's Day!

Oh but it narrows it down.

Shes also coming up as Deborah Boyd (born June 1959)- not under Professor title at Companies House —

find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/NI056106/officers

Where they recruiting like mad in those days (late 80s to late 90s) because of the new Fair Employment legislation d'ya think?

Possibly. They go through these long periods when they don't recruit at all, then they don't have enough panel members to cover their hearings and they go ram stam to get a whole lot of new ones in.

Although the early reference I have for DB has her as an IT panel member and not FET. They used to be more distinct, but they've probably got the same pool of panel members by now.

The Industrial Tribunals and Fair Employment Tribunal are independent judicial bodies supported by the Department for the Economy.

They are appointed by the Northern Ireland Judicial Appointment
Commission.

Terms are renewed every five years.

https://irecruit-ext.hrconnect.nigov.net/resources/documents/e/x/t/extended---itfet-candidate-information-booklet-final.pdf

Surely someone should be able to verify a Professorship or qualifications?

This is actually fascinating. Whenever you look at companies Deborah Boyd has been involved with, it all looks very plausible and even impressive, but if you take a closer look it just collapses and there is nothing behind it. She seems to have built a reputation as a successful businesswoman on pretty much nothing.

It's just: she set up company A (which failed not long afterwards), this was taken as proof that she had experience in the sector, her experience in the sector led to her appointments/ awards for x, those led to her appointment/ award for y which led to her place on the NI board for z, followed by her position on the employment tribunal for.....

I've been out of this world a while, but I'll say that NIJAC recruits the legal members (employment judges) and DfE does the non-legal wans (lay panel members).

Terms are renewable every five years on the basis of satisfactory performance, but there isn't the two term/ten year rule that operates with most public appointments. This is why they are not regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments, because they're not compatible with her code.

In practice, similarly to tribunal members in GB, they run up to age 75. Some members resign before then, some die, it's possible for them to be removed but I've never heard of it happening in practice.

The Re3 website is a lovely looking website that has no content whatsoever.

Seems NIJAV run process for lay members too and goes via DoE. Assume an FoI to DoE would be a reasonable way to ask re verification of qualifications.

I will say, there isn't a specific qualification for being a non-legal panel member. I don't know how it worked in the 1980s, but today there are the essential criteria and you fill out an application with examples of how you meet them, and if your examples are convincing then you get called to interview.

There's a key difference between NI and GB though. In NI you don't submit your CV, for reasons to do with discrimination law. There's an application form that goes through an anonymised sift. This is different from GB where the standard procedure is to submit your CV along with a covering letter bigging yourself up in terms of how you meet the essential criteria.

So the process is basically:

1. Are your examples on the application form persuasive?
2. How well did you do at interview?

It's not a perfect system, but I don't believe there is a perfect system.

Which is a long winded way of saying, whether someone's CV has been double checked might not be a useful question to ask when the recruitment process doesn't ask for a CV.

Got you.

But surely there should be verification of a use of title?

Not much to say, I’m on small talk chatting terms with a couple of people who’ve been mentioned. Not the lawyers or panellists.

As PPs have said, it’s a small place.

https://www.ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/word_doc/0006/254256/Nomination-Form-Visiting-Professor-Recommendation-002.doc

Surely she was a visiting professor for a period and has now been using the title - whether or not its use is appropriate? I don’t know.

At the very minimum she’s inappropriately using Professor title when she may have been a visiting professor for a period of time.

That in itself is misleading.

I say that even giving the appearance of claiming a title to bolster one’s credentials is so tantamount to fraud that it warrants an immediate recusal, and an investigation.

Most of the people that I know with Ph.D’s would rather die than introduce themselves as Dr. in a sphere not related to their academic field. Except my mother; she said she always got better treatment when people assumed she was a man, and airlines would offer her seat upgrades in case she was a medical doctor, who are always handy on aeroplanes.

At the very minimum she’s inappropriately using Professor title when she may have been a visiting professor for a period of time.

That usage has to stop when the term stops.

If she was Emeritus Professor - fine again.

She is not a Professor and there is a big sign saying Professor on a glass panel right in front of where she sat for five days of a pretty key trial.

That in itself is misleading. It goes to her integrity and indeed the integrity of the Panel. If we can’t trust what they are saying in black and white when it comes to their qualifications surely it calls into question trust and confidence of the panel as a whole (pondering out loud - awake with a young one).

Elsewhere she is using Dr.

So what I’m seeing (I’ll look at it fresh tomorrow) is that

• Boyd is born 1959.
• Boyd is appointed to the Employment Tribunal Panel at age 31 in 1990.
• Boyd is appointed to Invest NI in 2002 through to 2008. No sign of Prof title.
• Boyd is shown being referred to as Professor Boyd speaking to Select Committee so in Parliament in 2004 - https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmniaf/349/34912.htm
• Boyd is showing Prof title here in attached link 2012?

So we have a likely short period of visiting Professor role. Title of Visiting Professor should have ceased when term ceased.

But here we are 13 years later and we have a Panel member misleading the Panel as to their academic qualifications. They had a duty to conduct themselves with integrity. This falls well short of that standard.