Lawrence Warrell
11 February 1933 - 18 July 2020
It is withmuch sadness the Chartered Institute learned of the death of this highly respected member who had played a key formative role in the development of our educational material and in the establishment of qualitymarking and assessment controls. Friends and colleagues recall fondmemories and his defining qualities.
Lawrence Warrell (The funeral took place on 5 August at Blacon Crematorium, Chester)
Lawrence began his career in pensions in the 1950s with Oxfordshire County Council, where he started as a trainee. He eventually became the payroll and pensions manager, covering a payroll of 25,000 plus employees and pensioners. In 1974, Lawrence moved to Cheshire where he became assistant county treasurer (payroll and pensions) with a payroll in excess of 60,000. He also took on the role of payroll examiner for the Association of Payroll and Superannuation Administrators (APSA), for the nationally recognised APSA qualification. It was during this time that Lawrence and Peter Blackhurst, previous APSA and BPMA director and chairperson, became good friends. Lawrence was employed by Trevor Lakin of the British
Payroll Managers Association (BPMA), to become the principal author of the then BPMA Diploma course in payroll, part one, moving on to provide a supporting role in the content creation of part two of the Diploma. The Diploma has continued to grow in size and strength and is now known as the CIPP’s hugely successful Foundation Degree in Payroll Management. Lawrence also became a course tutor and member of the BPMA and a Fellow member of APSA, both of which ultimately became the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals, of which he was also a Fellow member until his passing. In 2004, Lawrence was the first-ever recipient of the CIPP’s Special Recognition Award.
Lawrence was a gentleman and a consummate professional, both in his local government career and in his second career as a payroll educator. When speaking to people since we received the sad news, the first reference everyone has made is that he was either “a lovely person” or “a perfect gentleman”, which is exactly the effect he had on everyone he met. If you let the Institute down you got the ‘Lawrence look’, but he was forgiving when people ‘reformed’ and produced their work to his standards. Although we have worked with many people over the decades, few have become as close as Lawrence.
Introduced to the then British Payroll Managers Association (BPMA) by Peter Blackhurst, Lawrence was commissioned by Trevor to write the bulk of the payroll content of the original Diploma – with a fountain pen as Lawrence had more than a smidgeon of Luddite in his body when it came to computers. His work was timely, well-written and rarely subject to correction. The problem with payroll study material is that it becomes outdated almost as soon as it is written, and it was the necessity to keep it up to date with Budget and legislative changes where Lawrence shone again.
He used a highlighter pen to mark the parts of the study units which would be outdated and during April we would spend two days together commissioning the updates of the units and allocating tutors contracts for the coming academic year. Lawrence had his finger on the pulse as to which tutors had excelled the previous year and should therefore be (re)contracted. This was not a feeling he had about them, but was based on mathematical systems of comparisons of marking and deviance from the norms which he had developed for the purpose. It was Lawrence’s mathematical and systems input that took the qualification to the next level, because a by-product of his input which caught BTEC’s attention was the method of quality control he developed. As the
...comparisons of marking and deviance from the norms which he had developed...
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | September 2020 | Issue 63 14
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