Our thanks to Mike P for this. Another incompetent woman about to be shoehorned into a senior position at taxpayers’ expense. An extract:
Mrs Skeer, who has served with Cumbria Constabulary since 1990 and took her first senior leadership position as an assistant chief constable in 2009, has been named by Peter McCall, Cumbria’s PCC, as his preferred candidate for Chief Constable.
The announcement follows a two-day selection process by a Police and Crime Panel, which will hold a “confirmatory hearing” next month to assess her suitability for the role before confirmation is made.
Mrs Skeer, who was not involved in the initial bungled investigation, first became aware of Poppi’s case after Mr Justice Peter Jackson’s first damning High Court judgement in 2014.
She took more than a month to call a meeting to address the criticisms, which lasted only 30 minutes meaning that she and her officers could not go through all of the points raised by the judge, according to an IPCC investigation in the case.
Mrs Skeer was also criticised for telling another officer to carry out an internal assessment of the Poppi Worthington investigation rather than referring her concerns straight to the Professional Standards Department.
She had previously been head of professional standards and should have known a referral was the “most appropriate action”, the report says.
