Bucks gives green light to integration of legal team with HB Public Law
The Cabinet at Buckinghamshire County Council has given the green light to plans for further integration of its legal services team with HB Public Law.
The move comes a year after Hugh Peart, Director of Governance and Legal Services at Harrow Council (which hosts HB Public Law), was also appointed head of legal at Buckinghamshire.
Cllr John Chilver, Cabinet Member for Resources at Buckinghamshire, told the Cabinet meeting yesterday [25 April] that the proposal for a fully shared legal service was in the context of the plans for a number of shared services between the council and Harrow. These include organisational development, HR and procurement.
“The aim is that the creation of a shared legal service will support the council in meeting its MTP [Medium Term Financial Plan] savings targets and provide for a stronger, more resilient and more cost effective legal service,” he said.
Buckinghamshire expects cumulative savings of £600,000 by 2019/20 from the proposals.
Cllr Chilver told the Cabinet at Buckinghamshire that the shared service would be overseen by a joint governance board, including the relevant Cabinet members and service directors from each authority.
He added that an onsite presence at Buckinghamshire's headquarters would be maintained, and that a full consultation with affected staff and their trade union representatives would be followed.
Cllr Chilver said it was important to note that the county council would retain a qualified solicitor to act as deputy monitoring officer, who would be able to provide legal advice. That individual is also expected to support the legal contract management and legal services commissioning.
A report prepared ahead of the Cabinet meeting set out these and other key features of the deal, which had already been backed by Harrow’s Cabinet. These are:
- Buckinghamshire will direct demand for all its legal work to HB Public Law. This arrangement will work in a similar way to the current trading account between BCC Business Unit services and the legal team at the county.
- Legal staff at BCC will transfer to Harrow under TUPE. Harrow will then be responsible for delivering the service in accordance with standardised key performance indicators. Buckinghamshire's legal team is understood to have 49 staff. HB Public Law will increase in size to around 160 following the deal.
- The following BCC services areas will transfer to HB Public Law: children’s legal services including education; adult social care legal services; property, planning and contracts; employment advice and litigation.
- The follow services currently within legal will remain out of scope and be subject to alternative arrangements: monitoring officer role; complaints (stage 2); school appeals; and insurance claims.
- The monitoring officer role, delivered by the Director of Strategy and Policy at Buckinghamshire, will remain an HQ function.
- The agreement with Harrow will be for five years with a review point at year 4.
- The shared services arrangements will be documented in an inter authority agreement to be entered into by BCC and Harrow.
The report prepared for Buckinghamshire's Cabinet revealed that a number of other options had also been considered in addition to the preferred model of integration with HB Public Law. These were: pursing the current strategy of incremental commercial growth for the Buckinghamshire legal team; market testing of its legal service; development of a partnership arrangement with HB Public Law; and joining one of the other emerging regional local government legal practices.
“It should be noted that in considering closer working for legal services experience elsewhere has shown that the realisation of maximum benefits is dependent upon more than simple consolidation of activity. Only complete integration will drive out economies of scale, improve core processes and deliver sustainable business benefits,” the report suggested.
The deal represents the latest phase of growth at HB Public Law, which was established in 2012 with the merger of Harrow and Barnet Councils’ legal teams.
This was followed by the London Borough of Hounslow joining HB Public Law on 1 June and Aylesbury Vale District Council becoming part of the shared service on 1 September.
HB Public Law and Buckinghamshire were also the first teams to set up local authority-owned ABSs.