Simonw66

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Simonw66. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about in the page West Midlands Fire Service, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
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In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. Shakehandsman (talk) 02:03, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Shakehandsman Thank you for the information you've provided. I'd like to seek your advice. First let me declare my conflict of interest (COI). I'm an employee of WMFS, however, I'm not employed in the recruitment team.

My desire is to remove the false allegations that have been placed on the page of my employer which are causing enormous distress to our staff. The allegations are unfounded and if true would be discriminatory under the terms of Equality Act 2010

The WMFS Press Statement states "Following recent media reports, we emphatically reject unsubstantiated claims that our recruitment of the best firefighters for the West Midlands is discriminatory"

I'm open to suggestions on how we can move forward with this. Simonw66 (talk) 09:25, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Hi Simon, thanks for declaring your conflict of interest. We can’t necessarily remove allegations if they’ve had significant coverage as these have, particularly when the service has been condemned for its alleged racism and sexism by a sitting MP. That statement you provided looks like useful material we could add. However, even that doesn’t actually deny the specific allegation in question. From that statement it appears to be the case they they are indeed using a discriminatory pass rate and then arguing that such discrimination is legal as a form of positive action. My understanding of the law is that such a policy would be legal in choosing between two otherwise equally qualified individual candidates. However, I don’t think it’s allowed so early on in the process, nor is it supposed to be used on a mass/automated scale. Therefore, seeing as its possible the fire service is indeed breaking the law and/or using highly controversial recruitment practices then the material is of note and thus belongs in the article. That said, there isn’t sufficient coverage of the WMFS response in the article and it is slightly lacking in balance in its current form so I’ll take the time to add something from the Facebook statement later (Facebook really isn’t an ideal source for such material but it will have to suffice as they didn’t respond fully in the media reports).Shakehandsman (talk) 17:59, 6 February 2019 (UTC)