Hitting the road

The Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors has been pursuing a number of important initiatives recently, including its first leadership summit, the adoption of a benchmarking regime for legal departments, and research into the relationship between chief executives and chief legal officers. Mirza Ahmad, the president for 2009/2010, reports on its progress.

For logistical reasons Council meetings of the Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors (ACSeS) have usually been held in London. However, 30 April 2010 was to have been an ‘historic’ first, seeing Council members travel to Bristol for a joint meeting of the ACSeS Council and the South Western Branch of ACSeS.

Sadly though, those calling the General Election on 6 May failed to consult ACSeS on its timing! This unfortunately meant that the Branch meeting had to be cancelled making it impossible to have the joint meeting as envisaged.

Nevertheless the Council meeting (held at Bevan Brittan’s offices in Bristol) was a great success and it was good to visit this thriving and substantial South West city. I am most grateful to Bethan Evans and Peter Keith-Lucas of Bevan Brittan for their generous hospitality and discussion on Total Place and related issues.

Some of the key points discussed in Bristol were:

ACSeS’s First Leadership Summit

This is being held on HMS President at Victoria Embankment on 12 July 2010 and includes advice from some key movers and shakers in local government on how to take your local government career exponentially forward.

Standards for England (SFE) Issues

The ACSeS membership includes many monitoring officers who have key responsibilities within their authorities for the local government standards regime. ACSeS liaises regularly with SFE (the body that provides strategic regulation for the regime) and is broadly supportive of the thrust of the reforms proposed by SFE.

ACSeS is committed to bolstering robust corporate governance within local authorities but within as light a touch a regulatory framework as possible. Whilst the Conservatives have previously pledged to scrap the present standards regime should they become the next government, the post election-landscape is currently firmly fixed within a very hazy crystal ball. All will no doubt soon be revealed.

The Attorney General’s Office (AGO)

ACSeS recently attended a meeting called by the AGO involving a broad suite of Government Departments and others who conduct prosecutions. Some valuable future synergies were put in place and useful relationships established which will add value to local authority regulatory activities and those lawyers supporting them.

Benchmarking and performance indicators

Currently ACSeS is running its own scheme to benchmark best practice across local government in conducting legal functions. However, ACSeS Council noted that the scheme currently operated by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) which was used for a spectrum of different services was more widely distributed and therefore understood within local government. Consequently, if ACSeS adopted the CIPFA scheme, the output data for legal services would be more meaningful to key authority members and officers. ACSeS therefore decided to participate in the CIPFA scheme.

Governance of charities

Local authorities need to put in place satisfactory governance arrangements concerning their trusteeship of charities. For unless there are clear governance arrangements there is scope for confusion on the part of local authorities and their officers and members as to whose interests are being represented in decisions affecting charities. This is because whilst council members have a fiduciary duty to their authority and their authority also has a fiduciary duty to the public, equally if the council is a charitable trustee it will have a fiduciary duty to the trust and its class of beneficiaries.

Revised modular constitution for local authorities

The current constitution (introduced in the wake of the Local Government Act 2000) is now showing its age and ACSeS will work with Linda Walker of Dickinson Dees in putting together a revised draft modular constitution for authorities.

Strategic relationship survey between chief executives and chief legal officers

I am working with University of Birmingham to undertake a survey on this key local authority relationship issue. This will take the form of an online survey of all ACSeS members and will be coordinated by the University of Birmingham (Ian Briggs) with a view to profiling the results of the survey at the ACSeS Annual Conference being held at the Belfry on 16 -18 November 2010.

The survey offers for agreement, disagreement or otherwise statements about the role of the chief executive, that of the chief legal officer/monitoring officer and about the organisation within which both operate. The survey builds upon some work conducted by the University of Birmingham with CIPFA on the role of the chief finance officer.

The next meeting of ACSeS Council will be on 2 July 2010 in Birmingham, along with a joint branch meeting of the East and West Midland branches of ACSeS. The 2 and 12 July 2010 therefore promise to be historic days for ACSeS as it takes respectively to the road and the river!

Dr Mirza Ahmad is President of ACSeS and Corporate Director of Governance at Birmingham City Council.