had one once with a single week notice couple of phone calls with local plod & a helpful bod at RHQ got it turned around with full SECO assessment.
Short notice Random events fine & people will try their best.
Well known annual events is more frowned upon.
The problem will be the small ones - like when you get invited to an event in the local park to do some recruitment - very often you wonât have details 6 weeks in advance. And if you now find out on a Friday, in the past you could throw a PME at the police and see if it sticks. Now you canât as there is no way a permanent staff member at RHQ has the time to approve, send it back and then you submit on a Friday - ergo no activity and a missed opportunity. Like it or not, there wil always be last minute opportunities and this new admin will mean we canât do it. I believe under the previous system, the PME had to be âsubmittedâ - donât think it ever had to be approved. But I stand to be corrected if so.
Yep utterly pointless bit if admin, Iâve been on both sides of a PME and havenât seen any real value added from either of them at a local level. (Being told somethings happening and getting a PME arenât the same thing, we need the former).
Yep AcF & SCC have got it squared away for remembrance.
If multi cadet force no reason why someone canât do a single one for all - just needs to cc everyone in 
Iâm suggesting that is likely what will happen, not what their intentions are. I canât talk for the Civil Servants.
Our local authority doesnât do its admin until the end of Oct so we canât submit ours until then!
Also, have they forgotten the staffing crisis in SW? Does alleviating their woes and trying to reduce their workload no longer matter?
Just a point that PME is only needed if your attendance is advertised in advance.
Otherwise a minor notification to the local constabulary does the job.
We support the local 10k every year, we do not advertise our attendance in advance but just drop a note over to let them know.
Sometimes they come and say hello, sometimes they might call us if something happens, but they also know not to panic if someone phones them saying the local park has been invaded
Bound to be called in by a Peter Iain Staker, after he reports that the swanâs escaped.
All well and good except when itâs not YOUR admin thatâs the problem but the e.g. RBL who donât give you details until a week beforehand
Do people actually know what a PME is for!?
It seems to be just more Admin and bureaucracy, but it serves a very important purpose. It feeds into very high levels of intelligence gathering. Military events (and that includes RAFAC) are potentially targets for protests and terrorism. local police, and other agencies see what is is happening in the area from a much much higher level than CFAV and even regional levels of understanding.
It is purely a Military procedure so we canât expect 3rd parties (RBL, Council, Village organiser etc) to do it on our behalf. It is more than acceptable to piggy-back onto a military units application, who you have surly communicated with in the planning process!? All SMS/HQAC need is the reference or a copy.
Not hearing anything back is a good (but still be vigilant). You will be very surprised who and what are about, both goodies and badies, and what recourses are deployed to be there or are sat about monitoring situations.
no, not so.
As a RBL Ceremonial Officer, and part of the organising team for Remembrance, it is not our responsibility for submitting the PME.
I tried when i first joined the team knowing what the ATC requirement was - but the organising team (RBL and local council) could not answer the questions on the PME form.
While the date, time, venue and event type is easy for us to answer, elements such as:
Service numbers attending
Event security officer (a role our village parade has never considered)
transport being used by service personnel
while we might be able to guess this based on previous years when I questioned the line âPME forms may NOT be submitted on the Unitâs behalf by the Civ event organiser or other 3rd party)â with the security force they confirmed it is not the place of the RBL or Parish Council to fill out the PME form.
i can only speak for what happens in our area and âregionâ of the UK it may well be different a few counties out.
Our district council also require 3 months notice for road closures and so are submitted in July - there is no point asking the Cadet forces if theyâll be attending and in what numbers in July.
My point being, a PME is not required as part of a road closure, and nor is it completed by a â3rd partyâ on behalf of military units (in our corner of the UK at least).
if the event is run, not by the local council but by the Military (ie heading by the local Barracks or similiar) then yes it is likely the PME will have been submitted but otherwise donât expect it to be.
@JoeBloggs has hit the nail on the head
absolutely.
we do inform the police, and they are happy with the âtime, place, event, expected numbersâ but that is not a PME application
except the form used in our area says weâre [the event organiser] cannot submit it on behalf of units
And just for clarity, i have dug out the wording from the PME submission form I [as the Remembrance parade organiser] was asked to fill out.
clearly as a third party to the units attending the RBL could not fill this out - we fed this back to the Sy team, and the attending Cadet units who now (presumably) complete it themselves
I was told out right by WO (RAF Police) at HQAC that i needed a full pme for rememberance as per the flow diagram.
Reason being the event is in uniform, advertised before hand to the public and the council dont submit full PMEs.
Real faff.
this is my understanding.
while it is not âadvertisedâ that the Cadets/military will be present, it is clearly a âmilitaryâ event and so expectation is service personnel will be present which is as good as âadvertising itâ thus Remembrance requires a PME application
So if itâs clearly a military event, why not just accept we are doing it? Remembrance Sunday is a key - why not just accept we are doing it, and if there is a specific threat communicate it to the relevant units.
Itâs like when bag packing used to inist on seeing the Public Liability Insurance Certificate - for Tesco. Thankfully the TSA stepped in a said just assume a national supermarket chain has one.
Iâm surprised tescos didnât just provide it. Our local ones has a pack up including the public liability that they give groups coming in (whether poppy selling, or bag packing)
This is the first year we didnât have confirmation that a PME hadnât been completed for the Parade, so we filled it in with a comment on it we are unsure whether one has been submitted so we are doing it as a just incase, weâve completed as much information as we can.
We got a response back (not expected) saying thank you, always better safe than sorry and they appreciate the numbers may not be particularly accurate.
Because numbers & uniform worn changes the threat assessment.
Blues is lower in risk than camouflage
Large numbers greater risk than low numbers.
If they arnât told (via a PME) then they donât know you are doing it, so they wonât tell you.
In additon as we are not real millitary, they arnât going to say much if the answer is âNoâ.
Knowing extreamly little of what the Mrs does for a living I think a PME is the least of the MOD/Police/Sneaky Beaky, concern to the CFAV and Cadets wanting to show their respects.
Except the police (depending on location) really donât care about a PME for a local event, itâs different if the whole brigade of guards is marching through London, whereas a local remembrance parade itâs not worth the paper itâs written on.
Itâs like TOPL the system really isnât relevant to Cadets.
