Giving the lead

The main theme of Mirza Ahmad’s year as president of the Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors (ACSeS) has been leadership. Philip Hoult speaks to Birmingham City Council’s Corporate Director of Governance about the challenges faced by local government lawyers.

How have you found your time so far as president of ACSeS? What have you brought to the role?

It has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience, so far, but extremely demanding. Obviously every president brings to the post something that they believe passionately about. For me, leadership was an issue and has been for a number of years. I felt that ACSeS should be punching above its weight and leadership was an area that we needed to be firmly grounded in, rather than just purely managing legal departments.

It wasn’t a question of drift. It was more a reflection that SOLACE has commanded the field, quite rightly, because they represent chief executives and a few years ago increased their membership by allowing senior managers within councils to be members. CIPFA has also been in that field for a lot more years than ACSeS has and, as a chartered institute, has the history and the infrastructure in terms of the administration to support it. CIPFA, SOLACE and ACSeS have worked extremely well together but I just felt that there was something that, from our perspective, clearly did need focusing on.

Our first A5 publication –­ Firing up the passion for leadership ­– was launched at our annual conference in Leeds in November 2009. We have now published our third edition and have had some excellent contributions and feedback – even from a senior government minister. The latest edition (launched at ACSeS’ Leadership Summit in July 2010) is very much about developing future chief executives with a legal background. I think that anyone who is an ACSeS member should really be encouraged to become a chief executive. The purpose of the publications and the summit, which was a first for ACSeS in this area, is to make sure that we are, as an association, seen to be influential leaders in that arena.

Although it has been a demanding time, the President’s Group ­– which includes the immediate past president, the vice presidents and our policy and communication officers –­ has assisted me and that has been immensely beneficial on a day-to-day basis. The group gives us great continuity. Part of ACSeS’ recent success is that, as vice-presidents, we become au fait with the issues as they emerge and you’re up and running from day one when you become President.

What do you think the so-called age of austerity means for local government lawyers? Do they need to adapt to survive, and thrive, in such a climate?

It’s a truism now, everyone accepts it, that the government has to act – whichever government got into power had to act – to address the UK's mounting budget deficit. Undoubtedly the bankers have left the UK economy in dire straits and, unfortunately, the public sector now has to pick up that tab. Local government is going to be hit for the next three to four years, but I believe it is ready for the challenge. I know I am, and I know that ACSeS members will play their very important parts in helping councils to address this age of austerity. These will not be easy issues, I accept that. There will also, undoubtedly, be a number of headcount reductions. There will be job redesigns, including structural redesigns at a locality level.

That provides challenges but also opportunities. It’s clear that individuals with the right skills will thrive in such an arena, and ACSeS will play its part in developing and training members to prepare for that.

A lot has been written about shared services, shared legal services and Total Place. What is your view on these developments? Do you share the concern expressed – amongst others by Guy Goodman, former chair of Solicitors in Local Government ­– about the potential risk of distancing legal services departments from individual councils?

The shared services agenda, with Total Place (or Community Budgets) in some form, is here to stay. Total Place means different things to different people but I think the concepts behind it are so powerful when you think about them. Why should the amount of expenditure coming from the public, from the Government, to a locality, not be used better?

The concept is right. What interferes with it are the organisational structures and the personalities involved in protecting their respective hierarchies. When you get commonality of understanding between those hierarchies, then they will realise that they can’t go on with a silo mentality. They won’t have the funds to deal with the issues that they’re required to deal with. And it’s only through collaborative working, through shared services and sharing best practice that they will actually improve the worth of the locality.

There is a wonderful opportunity here for local authority legal departments to play a leadership role. If I just take my legal department here in Birmingham, for example, undoubtedly it will be the largest legal department of any public sector organisation within the city. If it doesn’t take a leadership role, then there will be a failing on a massive scale, as far as I’m concerned. We have got to show leadership to the rest of the public sector legal departments by being open, by sharing best practice, by actually taking on some of their work and coming to arrangements where each and every one helps each other. That’s not diminishing the influence of my department within the council; if anything it’s actually promoting legal services on a bigger scale within and outside the city.

That’s a leadership role that I believe only the large legal departments can play because of their economies of scale, economies of scope, capacity and capability that go with it. Smaller councils will, obviously, not have large legal departments but the concept of shared services applies equally to them. By combining the demand, they can pool together and hopefully get better professional rates. They can attract better calibre of individuals and, hopefully, through that process be better placed to gain more work and stability for their departments.

Do you think lawyers are well placed to seize the opportunity? A theme of some of the stories we have covered over the last six months has been that the legal department gets involved at the latter stages of a project or initiative – if they had been introduced early on, then some of the problems could have been surmounted.

Guy Goodman is absolutely right that the lawyers, along with the democratic support staff, are the democratic glue within local government. What I’m proposing is no diminution of that. What I’m proposing is a strengthening of that role beyond the local authority and with the wider public agenda in terms of public services.

There are questions and challenges that local government lawyers will be tested against. I do believe that the lawyers and the democratic services officers will be best placed to deliver on those. But I think the associations ­– all of the associations ­– have a role to play to make sure their members are geared up to understand those pressures and how best to tackle them.

There will be some casualties, I accept that entirely; there always is, what is termed, collateral damage. There are risks within every organisation and there will be some casualties on the way, but the strongest will emerge.

One issue that lawyers in both commerce and industry and the public sector have grappled with, in the past, has been the issue of how they demonstrate they provide value. When an organisation is faced with thousands of job cuts, how do you demonstrate that it is worth keeping legal skills in-house at a time when people just want everyone to share the pain, say of a 10% cut in the headcount?

I would argue that demonstrating the value for money of a cost-effective, efficient legal department is quite easy. This can be done by looking at the chargeable hourly rates, the amount of productive work that they produce, the quality of the work that they deliver, the outcomes and awards /the satisfaction levels they deliver, to name but a few key criteria. I think there’s demonstrable evidence that any good in-house legal department can put forward when saying they’re providing value for money.

What is missing is the extent to which they are they providing outcome-based solutions, and solutions in the context of the advice that’s being sought. Lawyers don’t have to be right at the end of the chain. If they are recognised as being effective, efficient, value for money, solution-focused (in terms of adding value to the corporate centre and the council as a whole), then involving them early is part of the solution, not part of the problem. So from that point of view they actually sell themselves. The focus has to be on outcome-based solutions ­– if they provide the right solutions, then the value for money undoubtedly will be there.

What the new government has rightly done is got rid of the Comprehensive Area Assessment. It has also announced the abolition of the Standards Board for England (and, now the Audit Commission) and, along with that, made very strong voices about reducing the number of quangos, the bureaucracy and the overall administration ­ central as well as local.

You are now seeing a freeing up of public resources that were previously tied into those quangos and feeding the monster of regulation. I think you will find that local authorities will now be a lot more relaxed about saying, well actually, we can make more efficiencies here and be more effective there.

One of the questions to be asked then is what value benchmarking was adding before. What value is it going to add in this context of the new coalition era? And is it going to make a difference?

There’s ample opportunity for competent lawyers and finance officers to demonstrate that they provide value. What there is less of is their ability to demonstrate outcome-based solutions and that’s done on a day-to-day basis; and by how they interface and deliver those solutions.

Benchmarking through the CIPFA scheme ­– please don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it ­– is an initiative that we have signed up to, but it is a tool in that wider picture. I don’t think any reader of this article should consider that benchmarking, per se, is the Holy Grail or the answer to all of our wishes. It will just be a tool that managers use to understand where the value lies.

Has being head of legal become a more exposed position over the years? We’ve seen a number of high-profile departures in recent times.

The higher up you go, the more you will be in a position of leadership and therefore making the decisions. You can’t rely exclusively on your junior members of staff to make those decisions for you. And those decisions are made in the context of different interactions and relationships with different people. The mix with elected members is a very interesting mix, and requires very intricate skills of diplomacy and tact, and a whole spectrum of political awareness and sensitivity. A good lawyer needs to develop all of those skills that I’ve talked about for the highest level.

Things do change in those relationships; maybe it’s the way the individual said “no” on a certain occasion. These issues can build up a head of steam that can go against an individual and, as I said earlier, there will be casualties on the way. We just have to accept that there may be some very high profile casualties, rightly or wrongly. That, unfortunately, is the reality that someone faces when s/he is at the top. And it’s no different for chief executives of course.

How do you develop your team, so that those people with management skills progress and those who don’t have those skills are helped to develop them?

When I joined Birmingham in 2000, it had an excellent reputation in terms of having great lawyers. I’m glad to say, a decade on, that Birmingham still has a reputation of having great lawyers. What I think is now the difference is that the department has great lawyers who also happen to be great managers as well. And I put that down to the management development programme that I initiated early in 2001/2002, which received recognition from the Local Government Chronicle when we became legal team of the year in 2005.

We’ve continued with that programme, focusing on core competencies. The legal, technical knowledge –­ I take all that for granted. Making people into better managers and better leaders has always been my desire, over the last decade, here in Birmingham and that’s why I believe that Birmingham has excelled. The legal department has excelled as has my department of governance – both are accredited as Investors in Excellence.

Developing people is about more than just developing them for the role that they carry out. As I look at it, I’m developing people for local government, not just the job that they do. And if they happen to go into private practice, well, I don’t have a difficulty with that because I know that the skills and abilities that they have gained through my department will be immensely beneficial to them in private practice. We also take on private practice solicitors/barristers and they develop their skills here as well. It’s an open door, both ways.

Is one year as president enough? Would it not be better for people to have two years in the role?

I’ve taken on a big agenda and tried to condense it into one year. The publications and the leadership summit, for example, have been two big commitments and broken new ground for ACSeS.

The number of lawyers being appointed to a chief executive’s role has, of course, dropped in recent years. What I want to see happen –­ a reversal of this trend ­– is not something that can be achieved in one year. I see this as a decade-long programme.

If ACSeS wants to continue with these types of initiatives, it’s currently reliant on each president in those ten years taking a view to support or to drive it. Some of our presidents may not be as fortunate as me, in coming from a large local authority, to spend the time that I’ve spent on dealing with this. So there’s probably a role there for somebody to spearhead that project over the next five to ten years. It needs clearly a strong leadership focus and a steer from somebody who has experience of these matters.

What does the future hold for ACSeS? And is there room in the field for two organisations such as the Association and the SLG?

I think ACSeS has a very positive future ­– we’ve got some incredible vice presidents coming through. I will be supporting Susan Tovey, of Test Valley Council, as part of her president’s group when she takes over from me in mid-November.

Our links with SLG have been strong and will get even stronger. The current chairman (Steve Turner) and I have close links, and this was also the case with Guy Goodman.  SLG and ACSeS are doing what they can to produce shared responses, for example, to consultations.

I think the time may be right for an umbrella organisation. If you look at SLG and its membership and at ACSeS and its membership, then they are quite discrete membership blocks. An umbrella organisation could speak for all local government lawyers.

What I mean by local government lawyers, of course, will include barristers and legal executives. We want to extend this to democratic services officers and others who fall in the democracy and governance arenas. There’s a healthy debate happening between the two organisations, but we can’t say for sure, at this stage, how it will play out.

Philip Hoult is editor of Local Government Lawyer.