Communities Secretary names council legal departments amongst 'back office' services ripe for shared services

The Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has identified local authority legal departments as prime candidates for the shared services approach, alongside finance departments, IT and secretarial functions.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Mail, published on Saturday (2nd October) ahead of this week's Conservative Party conference, Pickles said that while he did not see privatisation as the panacea for dealing with spending cuts, he did say that local authority back office services should be merged to save money.

“There should be a merger of all local authorities’ back office functions, such as accounts, payroll, IT, secretaries and legal services,” he said.

In the same interview, he also called for all chief executive to take a cut in pay and again questioned whether councils with paid full-time leaders needed to have chief executives at all. Where councils do have chief executives, he added, they should be shared with at least one other local authority.

"You only have to look at the big salary recruitment adverts in The Guardian to see that some local authorities still don’t get it — these salaries are paid for by taxpayers,” he said. “‘Some chief executives earn enormous salaries that are not commensurate with the value of what they are doing.

"I want all chief executives to take a pay cut. They should be paid no more than the Prime Minister. Some are paid £250,000, which is ludicrous. These are ridiculous salaries that can't be justified."