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Union leaders have called on ministers to "reopen negotiations in the light of this ballot decision" after Whitehall mandarins blocked new proposals to change redundancy terms. The government wants to reform the civil service system, saying it is too expensive to continue in a climate of austerity. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said more than 80,000 of its members, a third of those balloted, took part in the vote and rejected the new measures. Tensor’s user-friendly time and attendance payroll and personnel software reports enables your firm’s HR department or management to instantly check the hours worked by an employee, shift or department. In the Employee screens an index tab system is used to hold different categories of information. Some of these are user definable fields, including user definable tables and arrays. Each user can define their own reports and save these for future printing; either automatically or on-demand. In many cases, users only require to 'view' data, thereby saving the time and cost of actual printing to paper.  

Around 200,000 jobs will be cut by councils in England this year following cuts in central government funding, according to a union’s claims. The warning came from GMB official Brian Strutton who fears councils will rush through redundancies before the end of the financial year in March as a last resort. Local government minister Grant Shapps rejected these figures and instead urged councils to save money and protect front line services by cutting executive pay and pooling activities. Saving money at your business can be facilitated with a Tensor time and attendance system which controls and monitors wages and shifts. Overtime is easily monitored by the WinTA software, with up to four different pay bands in each shift. Bands are selected based on the time and the number of hours worked. You can set breaks to activate between set times, and/or after a minimum number of hours have been worked. Groups are used to define sequences of shift patterns. Rolling Groups repeat a block of shift patterns. The block can contain any number of days or weeks.

A rehabilitation unit in Lancashire is to shut as part of a £18 million total savings review by Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Trust. The trust has served 55 notices of compulsory redundancy to people at the 40-bed Wesham Hospital whose jobs are at risk in the review, although they are hoping to redeploy staff. It is also requesting voluntary redundancies from non-clinical staff. Services and patients will be transferred to other nearby hospitals over the coming months. Time and attendance technology from Tensor is networked so the system can control multiple sites, which is useful if your staff are being transferred to other office or department. The built-in report generator makes it simple to get the information you need from the smart card operated system. Standard reports contained in the software include: Weekly Clock Card, Payroll Summary, Absence Summary, Exceptions, Job Booking, and Working Time Directive Compliance. Fingerprint recognition systems are also available to compliment the smart cards, providing a two-fold identification process for added security.  

Refuse collectors are meeting officials from Birmingham City Council in an attempt to avert a strike over a long-running pay dispute. Unions who represent the rubbish collectors are to speak with Council representatives after a recent vote was taken to only work 50 per cent of their shifts over a two-day period. Unions said a pay review meant some refuse workers would lose £4,000 a year. The council replied it had to change pay rates to meet equality laws. Issues of pay and hours are simplified, and will save your organisation time and money into the bargain, using Tensor personnel and attendance monitoring systems. Our smart card technology allows your employees to quickly clock in and out, with the time and attendance software accurately recording attendances. The modular and upgradable WinTA network – suitable for all business sizes – has many additional features, one of which is Annualised Hours. Here it is possible to keep track of time worked throughout the year by a particular employee.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), one of the oldest-ever forces, is championing the use surveillance camera technology. Last year 2,512 wanted people – including suspected murderers– were successfully identified by MPS thanks to the use of CCTV. A statement from the force said: “We’ve had great success with CCTV. These are people who often would have fled the scene and potentially ‘got away with it’ had it not been for CCTV. There’s no doubt that CCTV continues to help us make London a safer place.” Tensor and our partners CCTV Surveillance Ltd supply and maintain digital CCTV systems that are integrated to work with a standard PC monitor. This has been achieved through the development of sophisticated CCTV software. The software allows individual users to set their own criteria for viewing selected footage from particular CCTV cameras within the network. Password and security features limit the viewing of certain cameras to specific groups of people, enabling you to securely manage who is able to see particular areas of activity.

An MP has questioned why a company that is putting 900 Welsh workers out of a job – by shifting production to Hungary – is now hoping to secure millions in public subsidy to open a new plant in England. Vale of Glamorgan Labour Assembly Member Jane Hutt said of Bosch’s plan to shut down its plant in the Vale of Glamorgan and bid for a new technology site at Worcester: “This news will come as a real body blow to those workers who have lost their jobs in the South Wales plant.” Moving sites is made smoother with a Tensor Time & Attendance system based on smart card technology, which allows your employees to clock in and out extremely quickly. This information can be used to ensure that European working time regulations are not breached and can be exported in many forms to allow integration with existing payroll software. Your employees’ time and attendance data is gathered from the clocking machines and available in real time. Our WinTA network is able to work over national and international boundaries.  

As part of a cost-cutting exercise Cornwall Council is looking into the future of around 220 public toilets in the county. The body wants a complete overview of the service included in a wider programme of budget savings, so it is asking local authorities to look at how £1m could be saved in efficiencies over the next four years. Among the options being considered include delegating local public convenience management to parish councils or reducing opening times. The council said that every location can be judged on its own merits. Tensor toilet turnstiles incorporate a coin box set-up so that organisations or local authorities can continue to offer public toilet facilities. Generous revenues can be generated from the turnstiles for going towards their maintenance. Half height toilet turnstiles provide an unobtrusive method of controlling access to your toilet facilities. Styled in a tripod design, both single and double half height turnstiles are available, allowing you to double your throughput while keeping the amount of space used by the turnstile to a minimum.  

An innovative technical device is keeping members of the public aware of car crime issues in their neighbourhood. Solar-powered talking signs are reminding motorists about leaving no valuables on display so that items are not stolen from vehicles. Police in Greater London will also be putting up ordinary signs alerting about car crime. A Southall Police statement said: "Reducing thefts from vehicles is a priority for us. A lot of car crime is random, and cars are broken into to steal anything on show." Tensor’s sophisticated visitor and access control systems can include automatic barriers to help secure your car parking facilities and control vehicle access. At this point you are able to allow or deny access to any person visiting your site. Barriers can be controlled remotely, from your reception area, or locally, from a guard post next to the barrier. As well as an effective method of security, the barriers can monitor the number of vehicles travelling through any given access point. All automatic car park barriers are supplied complete and are ready to accept power and data connections.  

Huge cuts to Ealing Council's budget are worse than initially indicated, which will bring jobs and frontline services under threat. The authority must save an extra two per cent after receiving its grant allocation from central funds, making a total of £66 million to be cut over three years. The council said that a list of community and volunteer groups which will be affected will be sent to the council cabinet in the spring. Its leader Julian Bell said: “It's very disheartening when we have to make that level of cuts.” Tensor’s WinTA Lite is the latest in our proven range of Windows™ based time and attendance products, from simple collection of employees' clocking data, through to job costing and extensive labour hours analysis. Software reports show jobs that are over budget or those approaching their budget limit, useful if your company is finding finances are tight. This information can also be exported to spreadsheets. The Export to Payroll function links to Sage, Pegasus, Centrefile, Unipay, Moorepay, and other popular payroll systems.  

A technology group has been strongly criticised by a local government consultant for relocating to a cheaper labour market in Eastern Europe, while seeking to fund a new plant in the UK. Former Bridgend Council leader Jeff Jones said the decision by Bosch to put its 400,000 sq ft Miskin plant on the market in Wales for what sources said was £10m was “bonkers.” He added: “It really is absurd that they close a factory down in one part of the UK and then try to get taxpayers’ money in another part of the UK.” Personnel and clocking systems from Tensor offer all-in-one Time and Attendance recording facilities with job booking and job costing. Customised reports allow you to get the in time and attendance information you need to make on the spot personnel decisions. Our packages are tailored to the size of your business. For example, WinTA Start holds up to 50 employees’ details including a year-to-view absence planner. This shows absences for individuals or departments, making it simple to plan training and holiday dates.

David Cameron defended himself during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons when Labour Rhondda MP Chris Bryant accused him of breaking an election promise to protect frontline services. Bryant revealed the cuts affecting South Wales Police, but the Prime Minister said of the force’s loss of 600 staff: “Next year they have to find a 5% cut that will take them back – not to some figure of the 1980s – [but] to the spending they had in 2007-08.” A Tensor Access System gives your company full control over who is allowed access through any controlled point at any time of any day. If you want the sophistication and speed of smart card control, but do not wish to use a PC, then the T2002 is for you. It is simple to programme and operate, easy to maintain, and has the capability of connecting with up to two Tensor T149x scanners to create a "stand alone" two-door system. The T2002 is ideal for remote barriers or small sites, and is perfect for a low profile security application.  

An electrical giant will close its customer service centre in North Lanarkshire with the loss of 40 jobs. Employees of Comet who work in the service operations section have already been consulted. The company plans to centralise the posts at two distribution sites in Harlow and Skelmersdale further south in England. The firm's home delivery operation at the site in Scotland is not affected by the job losses. Comet said the move will enable them “to provide an improved and faster repair service for customers.” An all-in-one Time and Attendance system with job booking, costing and comprehensive user-definable working patterns, rosters and shifts is available from Tensor. Individual and group absence planners are of the many features of our WinTA software. Users can print reports created by themselves on any standard reports using a range of parameters, such as different dates, departments, groups or employees. This makes available information that would normally take hours or even days to produce with older manual card based systems or older DOS based computers.