THE Police Federation is calling for a review of state policy under which certain government vehicles are uninsured, claiming that its members are suffering as a result.

“We can confirm that they’re not insured and it’s a concern to us,” says chairman of the Federation Steve Brown, while signalling his organisation’s intention to pressure the administration on the matter.

Brown said police officers have had difficulty getting compensation from the government when injured or killed in the line of duty while travelling in government vehicles.

Although it’s a concern he has raised in public before, Brown refused to comment on the issue any further, saying he would be making a public statement at the Police Federation conference this Wednesday.

Brown’s understanding of the term ‘insured’ contradicts Section C4 of a Cabinet-approved policy dated April 24, 2003 and dubbed the Revised Comprehensive Motor Vehicles Policy for the Public Sector,which declares the government to be its own insurer.

The policy states that “government will be its own insurer of fleet vehicles” which are those assigned to a government agency in general, and not earmarked for specific individuals. The policy replaces that originally dated November 9, 1995, and applies to “central and local government and para-statals” and was written to correct former “weaknesses in the system.”

A different category of government-owned motor vehicles, those assigned to public officials and members of the political directorate, is insured by private providers, explained a government official who preferred not to be identified.

The government policy carries certain conditions for the insurance of fleet vehicles. For example, only the assignee or official driver is authorised to drive fleet vehicles. And in view of government’s “possible liability in case of accident”, only passengers on official business are to be conveyed in fleet vehicles, and assigned drivers who breach this provision may be sanctioned “up to the full cost incurred by government in the event of an accident”.

In addition, sanctions may be imposed on any driver of a fleet vehicle involved in an accident, if he is found to have been negligent or “a causative factor in the accident”, and the performance of drivers frequently involved in accidents are supposed to be evaluated.

But the notion of self-insurance by government is scoffed at by the Police Federation chairman.

“When people tell me that government vehicles are insured, they’re talking rubbish, because the police officers driving these vehicles, if police officers are at fault, they have to pay the cost to repair the vehicle,” Brown insisted.

Furthermore, said Brown, where policemen or women were injured while travelling in service vehicles, “little or nothing goes” to their families.

“We have service vehicles overturned, crashed, written off, (and) they’re not being replaced, so I don’t understand how they act as their own insurers,” Brown said.

In response to Brown’s claim, the government official told the Sunday Observer that the question of settlement would depend on the type of claim, and that his experience had been that accident claims were in fact handled fairly speedily, with many undisputed claims settled within a month.

“I’ve seen the accident reports coming in, especially involving third parties, private citizens…they always blame the police for creating accidents and not settling within a specified time, quite frankly many of the accidents with the police have actually been settled quite promptly,” the official said.

The cases which took time to settle were usually those which had to go before the courts, he added.

“That is where you have delays…once there is any sort of contradictory information, you’re going to have delays, and what I have found is that those that are outstanding for over a year are those (in which) you have two or three different stories, but if a bus for example, or a police vehicle hits somebody and is in the wrong, it is settled quite quickly, especially through the Solicitor General,” the official said.

He noted that accident and injury costs would be covered under the government’s health insurance scheme with Blue Cross, and where costs exceeded coverage, a Cabinet submission could “easily be made …in case of someone who has suffered grave injury, and usually when that happens, Cabinet looks very favourably on it”.

Unlike the Police Federation, the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA) has no problem with the government’s policy of self-insurance.

“We don’t have a particular concern about that,” said JCSA president, Wayne Jones. “It says that persons should not travel in these vehicles unless they are authorised, so if for example, somebody is travelling in a fleet vehicle and the vehicle meets in an accident, then the individual, if they did not have permission, they would have been left exposed, I don’t know that one can complain too much about that,” Jones said.

Jones noted that although the revised policy was dated April 24 2003, the issue of government acting as its own insurer is not a new arrangement. In fact, because of insurance requirements, the strict conditions governing the use of government fleet vehicles created problems of sorts in the 1980s when the Kingston public transport situation had deteriorated significantly, but the fleet vehicles could not be used to help transport civil servants, he recalled.

On the issue of compensation, Jones said that with all government vehicles registered to the Accountant General, all claims are dealt with accordingly. “You are not going to be any worse off had you been insured through a commercial insurance scheme. That’s (my) experience,” he argued.

There had also been improvements to the settlement process, in the context of the on-going modernisation programme in the public sector, Jones, said, adding: “We have seen a much shorter turn-around time, because that is also part of the whole governmental machinery.”