A presentation by the Director of Law and Assurance, WSCC.
Minutes:
Declarations of interest:
None
Witnesses:
Tony Kershaw, Director of Law & Assurance, West Sussex County Council.
Ann Charlton, Director of Legal, Democratic & Cultural Services, Surrey County Council
Philip Baker, Assistant Chief Executive, East Sussex County Council.
Elizabeth Culbert, Head of Legal Services, Brighton & Hove City Council
Key points raised during the discussion:
1. The Committee received a presentation outlining the spread of work across the legal services of all four authorities.
2. Members noted that childcare and commercial cases accounted for 69% of the legal services workload.
3. Officers explained that developing a resilient collaborative partnership across the four authorities would enable some of the challenges around finances and recruitment and retention to be addressed, and for expertise to be pooled to allow more specialised cases to be dealt with by the most appropriate person. It was recognised that building centres of expertise was important and that this would contribute to the generation of some cost savings.
4. Officers informed the committee that increasing demand in childcare advocacy cases was challenging and there were some instances where authorities were having to pay external solicitors to take on case work. The increase of childcare advocacy cases was put down to changes in society’s attitude towards safeguarding and it was suggested that childcare cases typically increase after times of economic challenge, although there was no reason behind the growth in demand being so constant in recent times.
5. The Committee was informed that the partnership currently had seven advocates, and were trying to recruit a further four in order to get the advocacy team to an optimum size to deal with the growth in demand. This in turn would help manage savings by reducing reliance on external advocates with higher costs.
6. The partnership is working with the Court Service to reduce the reliance on paper through the introduction of a digital court system. This relationship with the Court Service would not have been achievable by a single authority, so the partnership has provided some leverage in this area.
7. Officers highlighted the importance of all partners having access to a common system and a shared approach to IT, to allow for work to be shared. Members noted that a shared legal services agreement had been signed and a common Case Management system had been welcomed by lawyers and was working well for all partners. A plan to align practice management had been developed and was included in the Business Plan.
8. Members were informed that the partnership had introduced an initial 5% work sharing target as a way of getting staff used to how the partnership would work and as a way of keeping more work in-house. This was expected to grow. There was some discussion around charging and how this would operate, however it was expected that all partners would play an equal part in the delivery of work sharing. In the eventuality that a balance was not being achieved, a charging mechanism would be introduced to ensure parity.
9. Officers explained that the Orbis Public Law ambition is to become an influential player in the public sector legal market whilst managing partners’ financial challenges and maintaining the quality service delivered by legal teams across the partnership.
10. Members noted that success was measurable in that once fully converged, staff would consider themselves to work for OPL rather than a single authority, and that work was being done to the right standard by the right people. It would calculate an optimum delivery time for the completion of work, however the targets were likely to be moveable. The 5% work sharing target was a crude target to help encourage staff to get used to partnership working cross authorities.
11. Officers explained that performance was measured against time targets and that as of September 2017, these have been recorded digitally across all four partner authorities.
Actions/ further information to be provided:
1. Members to receive details of time recording data to capture performance and work completed across the partnership.
RESOLVED:
Members noted the content of the presentation.