Ladies Fashion Lunch

• Friday 3rd October 2008

Ladies Fashion Lunch – definitely one for the ladies but there is nothing to stop you guys from attending!! Over 500 ladies will assemble for our annual fashion show at the Palace in Manchester.  Fashion Show provided by John Lewis. Sponsored by Yorkshire Bank  

Excellent entertaining and networking opportunities. Further sponsorship available.

Please contact Sarah Clifford for further details on
0161 498 3630, email sclifford@sah.org.uk.

St Ann’s Dazzling Diamond Ball

• Saturday 11th October

This black tie event is a chance to entertain clients, colleagues and friends in the spectacular surroundings at Mere Golf & Country club. The theme of the evening is “Dazzling Diamonds” and will be a night of pure glamour and bling. All people purchasing tickets for this event will be entered into a prize draw to win a pair of ½ carat diamond stud earings worth over £1000. Sponsorship available.

Please contact Sarah Clifford for further details on 0161 498 3630, email sclifford@sah.org.uk.   

Lock up Your Boss

• Friday 14th November 2008

Nominate your boss and we will arrange for a police officer to ‘arrest’ him or her at the City Inn in Manchester for a joke ‘crime’ like having an offensive fashion sense or giving bad betting tips.   To win their release from the Victorian cells of the Police Museum they must raise bail in donations by calling contacts on their mobile phones.  Last year one of the bosses locked up said “My so-called friends and colleagues kept suggesting that the key be thrown away.  It was a memorable experience and I could not think of a better reason to be locked up”

Please email me dlakhani@sah.org.uk  or call me on 0161 498 3644.
Be brave and bold lock up your boss!!

Making Conversations Count

~ for effective, motivating appraisals
~ to deal with under-performance issues effectively 
~ for more successful client conversations

Helen Bailey, director of PINNA, is hosting a seminar to share with you the key to effective conversations… ‘Conversations that Count’

• Research shows 90% of people leave appraisal interviews less motivated and less aware of what is expected of them than before the interview.
• Managers avoid confrontation - avoid the conversations they need to have at the time they need to have them.
• Pleasing clients means minimising or eliminating the expectation gap - the difference between their expectations and your delivery.

Find out through PINNAs ‘Making Conversations Count’ seminar how you can have different, appropriate and more productive conversations.

WHERE, WHEN and COST

The seminar will be held at Leyland Golf Club, Wigan Road, Leyland PR25 4UD (within one mile of junction 28, M6) on Monday 11 August 2008.

• 4.30 pm Registration
• 5.00 pm Seminar
• 7.00 pm Buffet  

Cost £25 + VAT
To register your place contact Sandra Penswick at sandra@pinna.co.uk

Jack Rowlands, Director, PINNA Ltd.

Offer to Business Network Members

Capture 1 Digital Video Productions will produce and edit a 1-2 minute testimonial clip with one of your ‘raving fan’ clients for your website or for presentations at a cost of £400.00 plus VAT (usually £500.00 plus VAT).

Please contact Birgit Wilde on 0845 644 1896 or via birgit@capture1.co.uk

www.capture1.co.uk

Marie Curie Cancer Care is looking for players to take part in its national Bridge Tournament.

More than 178 groups nationwide signed up for the 07/08 tournament which is currently being played in supporters’ homes across the country and this year has raised over £39,000.00 for the charity.

The tournament is open to all levels and participants are asked to pay £3 to enter and give a suggested donation of £15 to support the charity’s work.

The money raised from the tournament will help Marie Curie Cancer Care to provide high quality nursing, totally free, to give terminally ill people the choice of dying at home supported by their families.

Entries for the 08/09 tournament are now open until 31st May 08 and the tournament will be played from October 08 through to March 09.

For further information please contact Regional Events Office (Midlands & Anglia) Tel: 01604 442313

e-mail: midlandsanglia-events@mariecurie.org.uk .

Congratulations to Jim Molyneux and Peter Moores, both students at Chethams School of Music, for reaching the finals of BBC Young Musician of the Year. Members of the Manchester Business Network will remember Jim from December 2007 when he played at the Christmas event.

Chethams can feel proud of their achievements, and particular congratulations go to Peter Moores, the 12 year old Trombonist, who was judged the eventual winner of the competition, earning the title BBC Young Musician of the Year.

Well done.

Helen.

All businesses whether incorporated or not should be aware of the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 which came into force on the 6th April 2008 creating the new offence of Corporate Manslaughter. 

For an organisation to be guilty of the new offence, there must be a gross breach of its duty of care to the deceased and that breach must be the cause of death. The new law will allow the Police and the Health and Safety Executive to scrutinise the activities of the organisation’s senior management and the way in which those activities were managed and organised. The Act throws up some serious questions about who is “senior management” and potentially catches employees at all levels of the organisation!

In response to the new Act JMW solicitors are running a series of seminars on this topic. The seminar will cover; the Law, the investigative process, what to do if it should happen to you and the related employment issues. The seminar will be approximately 1 hour in length.

If you are interested in attending then please contact Daniel Clark on 0845 402 0001 in order to book your place.

www.jmw.co.uk

Aster, a 5-year-old Hungarian hunting dog, will be taking the lead on a challenging coast-to-coast crossing of Scotland for charity – in less than 24 hours.

The short-haired gun dog, a veteran of scores of big hill walks, will be accompanied by four human companions in an effort to raise at least £10,000 for the Five Stars Scanner Appeal to help sick children at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. She will dip her paw in the North Sea at Beauly before setting off for a walk to Scotland’s Atlantic coast on Loch Duich.

Aster will be accompanied by former British and European heavyweight boxing champion Scott Welch, her regular walking companion former BBC Environment Correspondent and media consultant Alistair Macdonald, financial advisor and broadcaster Austin Hutchinson, and IT manager Chris Robinson.

Aster, a Hungarian vizla, said through an interpreter: ‘This is not exactly a pedigree team but they’re not a bunch of pussycats either. They should be OK provided we’re not dogged by bad weather.’

But she did express some concern about Scott Welch: ‘I know he’s a fit lad and has run across the Sahara but only our training sessions will show if he’s up to a cold, wet, windy day in the wilds of Scotland. Mind you, I’m not exactly going to pick a fight with him, even if his bark is worse than his bite.’

If the weather is good the team hopes to take in up to four Munros, Scottish mountains over 3000ft high. Aster revealed that she had already completed six and Alistair had done over 100. She hopes to see golden eagles and sniff out lots of other exciting wildlife like red deer and ptarmigan as they cross one of the remotest parts of Scotland.

Aster hopes to complete the 60-mile crossing in around 20 hours, though she has elected to supervise the first half of the journey – a 27-mile cycle ride – from her command vehicle. She admits her cycling skills are limited.

The team will be making the crossing at the end of May as part of the campaign to raise £1million for the new MRI scanner at the Manchester Children’s Hospital. The scanner needs to be put in place by the end of the year and so far only half the money has been raised.

‘Some of my friends say I’m barking but, frankly, if we don’t complete the trip  in well under 24 hours it’ll be a pretty paw effort,’ added Aster.

Learn how to grasp the problem and manage absence proactively by joining us on  

Wednesday 30th April at 8.30am

Mere Golf & Country Club   Chester Road   Knutsford   WA16 6LJ 

As an employer you don’t need to be reminded that sickness absence is an expensive problem for UK industry.  The annual cost to the economy is £13 billion and employees take, on average, 8.4 days sickness absence per year at a cost of £850 each.  This trend is continuing to rise. Whilst it is a big problem, it is also the trickiest for employers to tackle.

Occupational Medicals and Mace & Jones are jointly hosting a seminar that will help you to address this costly issue. Both companies have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with you and will be able to remove some of the myths that surround this difficult area.  With the current focus on sick notes and medical reporting, you will have the opportunity to hear from Dr Bharat Nanavati, a qualified occupational health physician and a GP.  He leads the Occupational Medicals team that specialises in treating back, neck and shoulder pain – some of the main reasons for sickness absence.  Dr Nanavati is able to bring a unique perspective to the subject and, through case studies, will be able to give sound advice on how OH intervention can help decision making. 

Mace & Jones will discuss how best to address the HR issues arising from OH intervention and discuss the basic policies and procedures that need to be in place to avoid the pitfalls. We know that your time is precious so we want to keep things short, simple and straight to the point.  That’s why we’re starting at 8.30am prompt, delivering some short presentations and case studies and finishing at 9.45am.   We do believe this seminar will be extremely helpful to your business. 

To reserve your place – or register additional HR colleagues – simply contact Samantha Kinnear at Mace & Jones via fax on 0151 243 9549 or email sam.kinnear@maceandjones.co.uk and she will send written confirmation to you. 

Numbers are strictly limited so please do reply early to guarantee your place.

Cameraclix are offering £75 off any stretched canvas of a Family FUN portrait, offer to Network Members and their families only.

Call John on 0161 480 1200 or email via john@cameraclix.com

www.cameraclix.com

“Increase in penalty points for failing to furnish information about the driver”

Buried deep in the new Road Safety Act 2006 - all 63 sections, 5 schedules and 135 pages of it - is a short, almost imperceptible 4-line section, section 29, which amends the existing ’speed camera’ law and which will have potentially far-reaching implications for owners of vehicles who fail to comply with the statutory requirement to provide information concerning the identity of a driver when an offence has been committed and caught on camera.

The law itself is not new - but the doubling overnight of the consequences of breaching it is! Until this amendment, which came into force in September 2007, the number of penalty points imposed in a case where the registered keeper of a vehicle failed to provide information was 3. The new law now doubles the penalty points to 6, effectively overnight. There is no change in the likely financial penalty to be imposed but, for most motorists, it is, and always has been, the points that matter. Accumulate 12 penalty points and your licence, unless your lawyer can argue ‘exceptional hardship’ for you, is at risk - a 6 month disqualification will follow.

Until this change, motorists who, whether by accident or design, failed to respond to the request for information (strict time limits apply, both for the police and the registered keeper of the offending vehicle) would sometimes take 3 penalty points ‘on the chin’, reasoning that, at that level, the penalty is no worse than the penalty for the motoring offence itself (typically, speeding or a traffic light offence) and could sometimes, in the case of seriously excessive speed, be substantially more lenient and that, on that basis, the system provided no incentive to co-operate. Whether that was a justifiable approach or not is now academic - the change of law means that if you deliberately, or by inadvertence or misunderstanding, commit TWO of these offences within a three year period, your licence is at risk. The ‘old’ law, itself characterised as draconian by civil libertarians, not to mention the motorists’ lobby groups, now seems almost liberal by comparison. It is (literally!) twice as important now that you seek expert advice - don’t be caught out by a failure to understand the law, the time limits, the availability of a statutory defence, or by a lack of awareness of other entirely legitimate challenges to the speed camera procedure.

For further information on all motoring offences please contact either Isaac Mirza or Peter Grogan on 0845 402 0001 (JMW Solicitors).