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Partly to lead by example when the body is cost-cutting, BBC director general (DG) Mark Thompson’s salary has been reduced. He earned £622,000 in the past financial year, which is down from £779,000. Mr Thompson earned 15 times more than the median pay of a BBC employee. He is stepping down in September, when the new DG will be George Entwistle. His salary will be significantly lower: £450,000 in his first year. Total BBC executive pay has also been halved. The Tensor Personnel.NET system is the result of a decade of real world experience in the human resources and time and attendance sectors. Our personnel software offers everything your company would expect from a personnel management system and many more features that will save time and aid strategic planning. Fully customisable reports can also be generated by the Tensor personnel software allowing it to seamlessly blend in with your own corporate identity. The Pay Reviewer function includes reports on projected pay increases.  

An estimated quarter of a million pounds’ worth of damage has been caused by a beach fire. Crews were called to a car park in East Lothian, in the early hours of Saturday morning (July 14). When they arrived a wooden one-storey toilet block was already alight. Fire crews remained in attendance at the rural Scottish site for nine hours before declaring the area safe. The block, which had almost been completed, is part of a £500,000 refurbishment of beach facilities. Access control, clocking and security products from Tensor are unbeatable at health and safety provision. This is because they can be integrated with fire roll call software that will automatically produce a report if a fire or other emergency occurs at the workplace. Your members of staff simply log themselves on and off site within a quarter-second using their ultra-fast proximity read smart cards or key fobs. An evacuation list is then printed at a safe pre-determined remote point.  

There could be an end to paid union time at work. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has initiated a consultation into how much paid time staff should be allowed to carry out union business at their desks. Mr Maude said: “In the civil service alone tens of millions of pounds are spent on trade union facility time and across the public sector that figure is much higher.” He concluded: “It isn’t right that taxpayers are funding full-time union representatives.” WinTA Start is an embryo clocking and HR system from Tensor for Time and Attendance, comprising a T32xx Smart Card clocking station and 25 Smart Cards. It can manage time and attendance recording for up to 50 people. User-definable working rules, rosters and shifts include a summary of clocking details which can be viewed at-a-glance. Human resources staff or supervisors can define multiple paid or unpaid breaks and ask WinTA Start to insert breaks if an employee forgets to clock them.  

Cameras will be mounted on police dogs to aid the pursuit of criminals. Twenty officers of the dog support unit (DSU) and their animals will be using the £10,000 equipment over the next 12 months. Police believe the gear will aid them in situations like drug busts. DSU member Inspector Chris Dawson said: “This bit of kit is fantastic. It attaches to the dog's head and we can get a live view of what they are seeing.” From automatic number plate recognition, visitor and prison monitoring systems, to CCTV networks – Tensor will have the right surveillance technology for your firm’s needs. The SiteSight system is an example of a mobile remote video which has 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. The solid state trailer system provides a platform which both transports the system from site to site and when in deployed-mode forms a self-contained working platform functioning as a fully integrated remote video system. Its features include a high output alarm siren and fully contained DVR.  

It was alleged at the Leveson Inquiry that two officers at high-security prisons took illegal payments from national newspaper journalists. Giving evidence, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said Scotland Yard had analysed stories possibly linked to payments to two senior prison officers at separate prisons. Neil Garnham, QC for the Metropolitan Police Service, admitted: “We frankly admit that there have been incidents which led to a plain perception of cosiness between particular senior MPS officers and particular journalists.” Security experts Tensor plc offers Prison Pass: a low cost pass regime which is a version of our computer-based systems for registering each visitor to a premises, both on and off site. It allows HM Prison Service Officers to quickly check the identity and monitor the movements of visitors. Comprehensive reporting software is available to generate records of the following – the historical movements of inmate visitors; contractor times on site; visitor to inmate analysis; and standard warning or banned notification letters.  

A committee chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron this (Tuesday) morning decided to issue more than one thousand additional armed personnel amid continued concern about Olympic security staffing levels. London Organising Committee (Locog) chief executive Paul Deighton said: “The reason that this decision has been taken is just to absolutely de-risk any aspect of the operation… with three days to go.” The extra troops, who had been on 48 hours’ notice, were called up before the weekend. Tensor can provide all manner and sizes of companies with automated clocking and access control systems that inform management when staffing or rostering levels are short. The proactive system keeps you abreast of events by automatically emailing or SMS text messaging both employees and system users. Examples of this function include supervisor notification when flagged employees clock in. Using speakers attached to a PC or to Tensor’s audio distribution network, spoken alerts are heard in a variety of voices and on screen ‘agents’ (similar to the Microsoft paperclip).  

Fewer pupils are being permanently excluded from school in England, say the latest official figures. The numbers fell by more than 11% last year. Department for Education figures show 5,080 pupils were expelled in 2010-11. Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, applauded the statistics but was concerned that certain groups were over-represented. For example, pupils on free school meals were nearly four times more likely to be permanently excluded and three times more likely to get a fixed-term exclusion. A method of improving behaviour in the classroom is to install PC Clock from Tensor. This is a simple PC based booking system ideal for places where each pupil has access to a computer. WinTA PC Clock is a cost-effective method of recording attendance as there is no need for a new time and attendance network (for example if your school has already adopted one for staff). PC Clock’s analysis module consists of a scaled-down version of Tensor's acclaimed WinTA Lite time and attendance software.  

A strike involving border control workers planned for the eve of the Olympics – which officially begin tomorrow (Friday) – has been called off. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union confirmed the strikes and work-to-rule action by immigration and passport staff have been called off. After some compromises PCS general secretary, Mark Serwotka, said: “The key areas like borders will see a significant increase of staff. We are proud of our workers who keep our borders secure. These are professional, hard-working staff.” Working rules are comfortably dealt with a Tensor clocking and time and attendance system. Absence management is one of its features. Using the time and attendance software you can choose to view all types of absences, a single absence type or all types with a common category. Absence categories and types are fully user-definable. Up to nine reason codes can also be stored in the clocking station. These allow clocking out for configurable reasons such as Dentist, Business or Smoking Break.  

The Aslef union is protesting at plans to reduce pension contributions, and train drivers who are members will soon be on strike. Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan said of the pension scheme deficit: “Our members face the prospect of either cripplingly high contribution rates or reduced benefits.” Transport giant Stagecoach, who own the trains affected, retorted that the public will be “shocked and angry” that strikes are being planned at a time of “great national pride” during the Olympics. Tensor has a range of clocking devices and networks, and biometrics can be added to your time and attendance system. Biometrics measures unique human characteristics as a way to provide irrefutable proof of identity, for example, finger scanning. A biometric scanner from Tensor (pictured) works by bouncing electro-magnetic waves off the live tissue and blood flow underneath a person’s skin in order to form a picture of the structure of the print. By actually reading below the skin, the chances of incorrect scannings are eliminated.  

A judge described the robberies of a jailed five-man gang as carefully planned and violent. The group tried to rob a jewellers in February last year. Today (Monday, July 30) three of the gang were sentenced to six years each at Ipswich Crown Court for conspiracy to commit robbery. Two of the gang were given nine years for that raid and for their involvement in stealing £80,000 of watches from an Ipswich jewellers in June last year. Tensor’s sliding gates are just some of our barrier devices that decrease the chances of criminals gaining entry to your site or premises. The gates cope with high traffic volumes and conform to strict security standards. The units perform under severe operating conditions and need no routine maintenance. Working alongside Tensor’s smart card and access control products, your gate can be used to monitor the throughput of an access control point. To find out more about our range of gates, please contact our experienced sales team.  

A boss has slammed rail station yobs who have repeatedly targeted toilets. During a visit to Bolton Station to meet passengers and staff, Lee Wasnidge, area director west for Northern Rail, expressed exasperation that work had to keep being done to repair damage. He commented: “We’ve invested £4 million and people can see we’re getting a lot of things right, but having spent a lot of money on the new toilets we’re constantly repainting them because they’re being vandalised.” Tensor’s gates, barriers, and turnstiles fully integrate with our smart card and biometric access control systems giving you full jurisdiction over movement and access in and around your site. Our turnstiles can perform various access control tasks, including providing entry to sites or toilets. It is imperative to have a durable and reliable system. Tensor will provide your organisation with just that. A Tensor system allows rapid communication when any delay occurs, such as when unauthorised personnel attempt to access a restricted area.  

Legal expert Chris Wellham, counsel in the employment team at Hogan Lovells, commented on the case of a long-term sick employee who was allowed to carry leave forward automatically and to be paid for all that leave. “This opens the way for employees on long-term sickness absence to claim holiday pay for the whole period of their absence when their employment terminates,” said Wellham. “For an employee who has been absent for two leave years for example, this could represent nearly three months’ pay.” One method of ensuring employees’ hours are recorded properly is to adopt a contactless smart card clocking system from Tensor. All Tensor cards and key fobs use the same well-proven and reliable RF (Radio Frequency) reading technology. This gives a consistent read range which is unaffected by most external conditions. Our most popular smart card is the T1305, which is approximately the size of a standard credit card and is thin and flexible enough to be carried in your wallet.