It was wonderful to see over 150 attendees at our 5th Annual Training Conference and AGM held at the London Fire Brigade Training Centre on January 28th 2008. Some of those attending for the first time have subsequently become members and I welcome you all. Our membership now standing at over 700!

I would like to remind you all that the successes of our training days relies on you, our members, sharing your case studies or sharing knowledge in your respective areas of expertise in way of presentations. Please remember our aims and objectives are to share training, education, knowledge and experiences with each other so that we can learn from each other. I know that by now we should have a full bank of speakers for our training days and articles for our newsletters, but we haven’t; please don’t be shy and take a step forward! This is YOUR forum, please feel free to contribute.

Our four day ‘Fire and Arson Investigation Conference’ (details on the right hand side of this page) is proving to be very popular, with many new applications arriving weekly. I encourage you to make every effort to attend so that you can receive 24 hours quality Continual Professional Development training that is being delivered within the programme. Remember that we are in a new financial year! All details can be found on our website.

On the Wednesday evening during the four day conference, we will be celebrating our fifth year by taking a river boat up along the River Thames with the cost including a disco, buffet and five free drink vouchers, one for each year! Due to excellent negotiations by your Secretary, the cost for the River Boat is now only £35.00/head (Full registrations include this cost). Those of you that are attending on a daily rate or not attending the conference at all, may wish to join us on the Wednesday evening. Please contact claire.purton@iaai-uk.org as soon as possible as places are limited to 150.

Our web site has taken a lot of energy to set up, a huge thank you to Andrew Carey for all of his hard work and for donating his time to complete the project. This web-site will be a gateway for us to contact each other, it will have regular updates for news, views and membership information.

Your Certified Fire Investigator (CFI) Programme Proctor and I are currently in communications with the Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) to assimilate the IAAI-CFI qualification with the NVQ System. If we can achieve this then the impending Fire Scene Investigator (FSI) programme that I discussed in our last Newsletter (Autumn 2007 and downloadable from our website) would also be assimilated. I anticipate the IAAI-FSI qualification to be equivalent to an NVQ Level 3 or a City and Guilds. This will be a major move forward within the professional discipline of fire investigation. We will keep you updated as to any progress.

In May of this year I attended the IAAI Annual Training Conference and AGM in Denver, USA, representing your interests both as Chapter President and a Board of Director. As you know, I sit on several committees and have been fortunate to have gained knowledge and experience from being an active part of those committees, which has assisted the IAAI-UK progress in its development.

We have just successfully become a Registered Charity. Our thanks go to our Secretary Claire Purton for all her hard work in processing the applications.

We are making provisional arrangements for our Summer Training Conference 2009 to be held in Guernsey. We will be seeking good hotel rates and hope that you will be able to make a short break of it; it will certainly be somewhere different and out thanks go to Brian Sarre, a long standing member, who initially invited us to hold a meeting there several years ago. As we stated in our very first meeting in 2003, we aim to support all regions within the UK and welcome offers of training venues.

In November 2008, (date and location to be advised), we will be holding a one day seminar with the Forensic Science Society. There will be a cost to this seminar and details will be circulated when finalised. We are hoping to hold it at a venue in the West Midlands Region.

I would like to offer our thoughts to the families of all emergency personnel that have been injured and killed in the line of duty and those that are involved in their subsequent long and often complex investigations.

Finally, I have recently returned from Rouen, in France, where Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. I couldn’t help myself but managed to gather enough information by the tour guide (although I couldn’t substantiate the evidence) that confirmed this was actually a deliberate ignition and no accidental cause could be established. This made the tour guide feel a lot happier! (Who’s an anorak?)

Peter Mansi
President, IAAI-UK Chapter