Enjoying the challenge

LLG President Paul Turner has worked in local government throughout his legal career. Philip Hoult talks to him about what drew him into the sector, the benefits of working for different kinds of local authorities, and what challenges such as local government reorganisation mean for legal teams.

Paul Turner, the President of LLG for 2025/26, spent his early years in a village by the sea just south of Lowestoft, before the family moved to Ipswich.

Despite hailing from a family of engineers and doing A Levels in physics, chemistry and maths, a career in science didn’t appeal and so he chose to study law at the University of Leeds.

His first taste of local government came after his second year at university, when he undertook a week’s work experience at Suffolk County Council.

“They asked me to do a piece of research relating to a plane spotters’ car park, where people came from all over Europe to spot planes at RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, the military bases. And the plane spotters were blocking the road,” he says.

He was asked to look into whether to put up a sign in the car park warning of the noise levels from the US Air Force planes, which were loud enough to damage your hearing.

“The council had designed a sign, warning of very loud noise levels and advising the spotters to stay in their car with the windows up or use air defenders. It also said that ‘Suffolk County Council accepted no responsibility for any damage….’. So I had to do research as to whether that was a good sign to put up or not.”

The eclectic nature of projects such as this appealed and so Turner became keen on working in government.

However, the country was in recession at the time he graduated. “It was quite hard to get a training contract at the time - I think if I'd been two years older, you could basically get a training contract wherever you wanted,” he says.

Turner secured a training contract at South Cambridgeshire District Council, which was then Britain's only local authority without a town and whose offices were in Cambridge at the time.

There were just three members of the legal team, and Turner would deliver deeds around Cambridge on the council’s butcher’s bike which proudly displayed the authority’s coat of arms.

“At an authority like South Cambridgeshire, you get to deal with really interesting legal problems that you wouldn't normally get to deal with in private practice, and then deal with councillors, and then deal with members of the public,” he says.

“It isn’t just the variety, it is the human interest as well – it is not dry banking law or insurance law, or whatever. And you get to see the consequences of your advice. If you're in private practice, you give your opinion, and the client pays the bill, hopefully, and everybody moves on. Whereas when you are in-house in a council, you know what's going on in an area, and you know the consequences of what's happened.”

His first move after qualification was to another small district, Alnwick in Northumberland, which Turner says was “equally entertaining, with more sheep than people living in the district” – the council, which was absorbed into Northumberland Council on reorganisation in 2009, had a population of just 31,000.

Turner’s arrival increased the size of the legal team by 50% - from two to three. There was a large amount of property work, but the council was also involved in a range of disputes. The owner of the famous Craster kipper business judicially reviewed the council about the right to speak at a planning committee meeting, there was a major planning dispute – eventually settled but one that had had potentially serious financial ramifications – over the council’s grant of permission for a supermarket, and there was a case about bait digging causing damage to the beach at Boulmer that ended up in the High Court.

So how did Turner find dealing with such variety at such an early stage of his career?

“Obviously, the district solicitor would have led on the larger cases. But I have always liked legal research, and I have always found that if you do a lot of work, you can normally solve the problem. I'm not a fantastic advocate, but if you go in there, if you know what you're talking about, it doesn't matter so much. I am not going to say I look forward to doing lots of advocacy, but solving legal problems is what I've always really enjoyed doing,” he says.

Turner eventually moved back to East Anglia and joined Ipswich Borough Council. “That was a really interesting time, because there was a lot going on there. It was a very active council with a huge portfolio of services. At the time it was the second largest employer of any district council in the country. All services were in-house. It had a highways agency. It had a theatre and cinemas that it operated itself, a lot of housing and a lot of economic growth.”

Having practised in pretty much all areas bar child protection during his career, it was at Ipswich where Turner first took on monitoring officer responsibilities.

“You could tell the authority was going to go through a difficult time,” he says. “There were two changes of political control, and it was really interesting. It was so tight that at the annual meeting, we didn't know who the mayor was going to be until the town hall clock struck six and the start of the meeting. One of the members we were expecting to turn up was not there, which would have changed the outcome of the vote on the mayor, and then she turned up, two minutes later. So you had to plan for two completely different scenarios and that really put the constitution under a lot of scrutiny. It piqued my interest in governance matters.”

This work included rewriting the council’s constitution when the Local Government Act 2000 came in, and dealing with standards cases under the old Standards Board for England regime. “We had to work out how to get that to work. And we had significant cases as well.”

A subsequent spell as Deputy Borough Solicitor at Tameside Council in Greater Manchester lent a different perspective. “It was twice the size of Ipswich in terms of population. They were very different types of areas. And there was another recession after the credit crunch. So there were a lot of failed regeneration schemes, which we had to rescue or unlock.”

These different experiences have been invaluable, the LLG President says, and something he would recommend to lawyers in the sector. “I think if you want to progress your career, you should work at different authorities. It gives you a different perspective. If you stay in one place, you only know one way of doing things. I have had several, completely different types of boss over the years. I've learned very different things from them. I don't model myself on any of them, but I've learned a lot of their techniques. The more people you work with, the better you are at spotting problems and dealing with things.”

An opportunity to focus on governance matters led him to move to a corporate lawyer role at Essex County Council, and in 2017 he took on his current role as Director, Legal and Assurance. It is now almost twice as long as he has stayed anywhere else.

Turner’s involvement in LLG came initially through local meetings in Suffolk, and he was subsequently asked to be chairman of the Eastern branch. “I got to meet the LLG team through that and I thought, well there is a lot that you could achieve [through the organisation].”

It was around that time that the Government appointed Essex County Council to the role of Commissioner at Thurrock Council – the first, and so far only, time that a local authority has been appointed to the role – and tasked it with carrying out the best value inspection.

Turner was asked to carry out governance work as part of the intervention. He worked alongside internal colleagues but also lead inspector Tony McArdle, who has been appointed by the Government to roles at a range of authorities subject to intervention such as Croydon, Birmingham and Nottingham.

Turner says that one of the things that crossed his mind when looking at what had happened at Thurrock was that there was extensive guidance on offer for Section 151 officers, but there wasn’t the same for monitoring officers.

Addressing that is one of LLG and Turner’s main priorities for his presidential year, which is to press ahead with the establishment of the new association of monitoring officers, the idea of which was floated in the LGiU thinktank and law firm Browne Jacobson report for LLG in November 2023.

LLG has done excellent work producing various codes and highlighting the importance to good governance of the ‘Golden Triangle’ [the Head of Paid Service, the Chief Finance Officer], he says, but the new association is intended to bring this together and produce a more comprehensive offering. “For example, there is a lot of peer support going on, but it's not necessarily organised, it’s a bit random. We want to try and use new association to build a knowledge base for the whole the sector.”

Turner said the LGiU/Browne Jacobson report chimed with what he felt and he thought he would be in a position to help deliver its recommendations in his presidential year.

“Thurrock made me realise how important the role of monitoring officer can be to try and prevent some of this stuff from happening, but also how difficult it can be to take the stand that you perhaps need to take – particularly with the weakened statutory protections that monitoring officers now have. During the period covered by the inspection, there were five monitoring officers at Thurrock, which is a sign in itself of the difficulty of the role. People aren’t being given the circumstances in which to succeed, to properly carry out the role and speak truth to power.”

Another lesson from Thurrock for Turner was that there is a huge amount of information that is put to members by finance teams, “but it is really important that that as monitoring officer, you have some understanding, even if you don’t understand it all”.

LLG will be launching the new association at its governance conference in London later this month and Turner is particularly keen for the nascent organisation to produce peer-reviewed guidance of use to its members – LLG already does many of the things that you would expect, he says.

He cites as an example the thorny issue for monitoring officers of when to issue a Section 5 report under the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 on potential contraventions of the law or maladministration.

During his time as president, LLG has meanwhile continued to make the case for reforms to the standards regime, and the introduction of legislation on remote meetings and proxy voting.

“I am old enough to remember the Local Government Act 2000 standards regime with the Standards Board for England – it was all right, the problem was that the system got gummed up with cases,” he says. “By giving monitoring officers the ability to filter things locally has made a huge difference. The standards system is not gummed up now, but [the proposals for stronger] sanctions for serious breaches of a code of conduct are really, really important. Everyone knows it just needs to happen.”

[After this interview was conducted, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published its long-awaited consultation response, in which it committed to implementing a mandatory code of conduct for councillors and new powers to suspend elected members]

It is a similar story with remote meetings and proxy voting, with the Government saying it would put forward legislation to put this on a permanent footing “when Parliamentary time allows”. Indeed a couple of weeks after this interview, LLG was one of seven local government organisations to sign a joint letter to the Minister of State for Local Government and Homelessness warning that the absence of remote or hybrid meeting provisions in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill represented a "serious missed opportunity to strengthen local democracy, improve accessibility, and future-proof local governance".

Turner believes there is an enthusiasm within government to push this work forward, but fears that, with the plans to introduce combined authorities in all areas and to scrap the two-tier system, it is not high on ministers’ list of priorities.

“We keep asking the question on behalf of members of LLG, but it's hard to know whether it will be next week, next year or in three years.”

Asked what he sees as the major challenges for local government lawyers right now, Turner points to political change, rising workloads and – for those affected – the Government’s programme of local government reorganisation and devolution.

“It is a very interesting time for local politics everywhere – for those who have had elections, there has been upheaval,” he notes. “But, regardless of whether or not there have been elections in a place you are seeing politics becoming more tense and in some cases more performative that it used to be. There’s less consensus and there’s more performative politics going on in some parts of local government.”

The role of the monitoring officer is to support their members, to deliver what can lawfully be delivered, he notes. “And monitoring officers will take that very, very seriously, and work really, really hard. But sometimes it's a ‘no’ because there's no lawful way of doing it. Or it’s a case of ‘you need to tell us more about a proposal to make it work’. They may see the lawyers as ‘the Blob’ or blockers. But the consequence of saying ‘yes’ when the answer is ‘no’, can be significant.”

Turner also highlights the ongoing challenge for legal departments of handling increasing workloads with no more money. “It’s a case of trying to balance the books and keep people's workloads reasonable,” he says.

Among the pressures he points to are a backlog in childcare cases, new legislation such as the Procurement Act 2023, and the Government’s drive to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament in part through major reform to the planning regime.

This is before you take into account the uncertainty created by local government reorganisation, which has loomed large over Turner’s year in office.

“People understandably want to know what their future is going to be,” says Turner. “At one level it’s really hard to say when you don’t know what local authorities will exist in three years’ time, but on another level there are going to be just as many pieces of litigation, not fewer, there is going to a lot of work generated in contracts, employment and other areas. When you look at social care contracts, for example, at the moment we [Essex] contract on the basis of a population of one and a half million. If there's going to be three, four or five unitaries in Essex, that will be transformative. The county council has a social care company, so what do we do with that? At the moment, we 100% own it, but how will ownership of that be divided up?”

Agreements will need to be struck between the new councils on the settlement of liabilities and properties, he adds.

Discussions will also have to take place on the provision of legal services. For example, it may be that the new councils in Greater Essex might want to keep an area-wide legal team. “That’s a question I can’t answer. There are some areas where it would be a benefit in keeping the team together.”

However, if there were to be three unitary councils in Greater Essex, they would each have a population in the region of 700,000 and so be sizeable councils in their own right.

There is a balance to be struck, Turner suggests, between democratic accountability and the scale of provision. A Greater Essex legal team would make it easier to deploy lawyers where the work is, if there was a sudden increase in one part of the region.

“But it will for the new councils to work out,” he notes. “A large, shared service is very doable, but everyone has got to want it to work.”

The answer, he says, is for the lawyers to “enjoy the challenge of implementing local government reorganisation because it is what it is”. Enjoying the challenge is a mantra that has served Turner well throughout his local government career.

Philip Hoult is Editor of Local Government Lawyer.