Capital Ambition launches guide to sharing professionals, says proper governance "vital"
London’s regional improvement and efficiency partnership (RIEP) has published a guide for local authorities on sharing professionals, including lawyers.
The Capital Ambition guide is intended to help London boroughs considering sharing individuals, sharing a team or sharing through procurement of services from another authority. The publication covers:
- Deciding whether sharing professionals is the right action to take
- Building the business case, and
- Actions that need to be taken to implement it.
In the introduction, Capital Ambition said: “It is clear that these types of arrangements can and do work, delivering financial, service and partnership working benefits. However, it is also apparent that they may not be right for all situations and roles, and that they need careful thought and focused execution to ensure their success and avoid some of the potential pitfalls.”
The RIEP said sharing professionals can be “a sensible response to a short term problem that yields useful benefits, especially in reducing costs”.
However, the guidance warned that there are challenges in the tactical sharing of professionals which “become more pronounced as integration becomes the aim”.
Capital Ambition said: “Good preparation and execution of the necessary staff work remains, but the requirement to have proper governance arrangements in place becomes vital.”
Moves to sharing professionals may require significant cultural change and involve disruption to those actually making the decisions, it added. “These ideas will only work if all the partners have the required commitment – it’s easy to talk about transformation when it involves other people.”
The RIEP said the issue raised more fundamental questions about how professional services can best be designed to deliver optimum efficiency and effectiveness across London. It also suggested that there is perhaps a need to undertake some ‘what if’ modelling around changing operating models to see how these could potentially reduce cost and improve service delivery.
The publication follows a scoping study by Tribal, which found there was strong interest and support “at least in principle” for the idea of boroughs sharing their scarce professionals, especially in those areas in which they currently have difficulty recruiting.
Capital Ambition added: “Although there is evidence that some ‘sharing’ occurs, there is not yet a clear shared understanding of what ‘sharing professionals’ might involve, or of what the potential options might be; the risks of entering into such arrangements can also be under-estimated.”
The RIEP has also recently published three case studies examining shared assistant director posts at Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea, the provision of PR services by Westminster City Council to other London boroughs through a contractual arrangement, and combining head of human resources posts at Sutton and Merton.
The Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC) case study focused on the local authorities’ sharing of assistant directors in legal services and highways. Both arrangements came about on an opportunistic basis, when a vacancy occurred in one of the boroughs.
RBKC approached Hammersmith & Fulham when it had a vacancy in legal, with the shared arrangement – Michael Cogher took the position – operating in June 2009. Cogher remains employed by Hammersmith & Fulham.
A number of steps have been taken to manage risks involved in the arrangement, dealing with – amongst other things – priorities and workloads, and conflicts of interest.