Norfolk authorities to launch integrated legal service in October 2010
A group of local authorities in Norfolk is to implement a joint legal services team – dubbed Norfolk Legal – that will go live on 1 October 2010.
The key stakeholders in the integrated service are Norfolk County Council, Norwich City Council and Great Yarmouth Borough Council.
The county council will host the service, with staff from Great Yarmouth and Norwich transferring under TUPE. The combined team will have 73 staff, who will be encouraged to move to the most appropriate location of the service. However, it is envisaged that there will be no forced moves.
Other authorities, including Broadland District Council and the Broads Authority, will enter service level agreements with Norfolk Legal, but will not transfer staff or share directly in the risk and reward of the service. There is also scope built in for further authorities to join the service at a later date.
The intention is for Norfolk Legal to provide a full range of legal services to internal and external public sector clients in four areas: public protection (including licensing, fire and trading standards); property, environment and regeneration; local authority services (including child protection, education, housing and procurement); and corporate (including advice to members and officers, and monitoring officer matters).
These clients will initially be drawn from within Norfolk, but the aim “in the longer term” is to source them more widely.
The new service has grown out of the Norfolk Legal Partnership, a more informal arrangement that has all local authorities in the county and the Broads Authority as members. The partnership agreed in 2007 to work towards the goal of a joint service model.
Victoria McNeill, head of law at Norfolk County Council, told Local Government Lawyer that the legal teams “had been discussing the idea for quite some time, recognising that we would be better together than apart in terms of strength in depth and being able to provide a range of legal expertise for all the authorities.”
One of the main drivers was efficiency, she said. “The authorities in the Norfolk Legal Partnership were all needing to provide similar services and be run by someone, and we saw some really good opportunities for making efficiencies there in terms of some our major procurements such as online library services. The district councils were also keen to tap into the likes of our case management and our time recording systems.”
McNeill said that one of the barriers in the past had been the perception that the county council would effectively take over the districts. However, she added: “What we have managed to do is have a truly collaborative approach to this and work as equal partners with the two main stakeholders (Norwich and Great Yarmouth) and also with the other authorities which will contract with us.”
McNeill suggested that the flexibility of the scheme – with some councils becoming stakeholders and others entering into service level agreements – was key.
She said: “It was very important for to have that flexibility because ultimately we are political organisations. Members sometimes want to do things in a different way from another set of members, so we had to set up a framework which would allow for a different kind of participation. For example, some authorities may want to use the Norfolk Legal monitoring officer services, while others will want to keep that in-house.”
Norfolk’s head of law added: “We believe we can deliver efficiencies for all those who are joining the service in one way or another. It will genuinely be a single service and we will hopefully be co-located sooner rather than later, but yet continue to provide the services across Norfolk that the authorities are looking for.”
Two authorities in the county, Breckland District Council and South Norfolk District Council, have not joined Norfolk Legal because they are currently involved in putting together plans for a “super district authority” with a joint management team and a single chief executive.
McNeill said: “They have been focused on their own efficiencies-generating tie-up and taking that forward. We have had discussions with them and will continue to handle work for them under the new structure. It’s a matter of letting them set up what they need to do first and then seeing how we can help them.”
A report submitted to Norfolk County Council’s Cabinet last month identified a number of opportunities that the shared legal service would provide, including “to:
- Merge budgets to secure leverage with suppliers and volume discounts
- Introduce an effective and fit for purposes staffing structure to maximise productivity
- Streamline workflows to avoid duplication of work
- Reduce the use of external solicitors and barristers to achieve savings
- Share specialist knowledge to generate cost savings and increase strength and depth of expertise
- Create a unit which can be ‘employer of choice’ for legal staff, aiding recruitment and retention, and
- Develop a Norfolk Legal extranet-based knowledge bank to share know how and flexible working.”
The financial model will see Great Yarmouth and Norwich transfer its annual budget for in-house legal services, less 10%, to Norfolk Legal. This model will apply to the 2010/11 and 2011/12 financial years, and be reviewed in March 2012.
The reduction in budgets will be managed by reducing work outsourced to private practice and counsel, cutting back on legal books and library resources (all staff will have access to a single online reference system) and the loss of one post at Great Yarmouth. It is expected that this will generate savings worth £150,000.
Any surplus or deficit generated by Norfolk Legal will be shared by the three stakeholder authorities in proportion to the annual expenditure of each authority on its in-house legal services.
Norfolk Legal will be governed by a management board consisting of a senior officer and a portfolio holder from each stakeholder authority. The head of service will be the county council’s head of legal services.
The authorities are developing a stakeholder agreement that will, amongst other things, set out those decisions which require member involvement.
The plans have now been approved by all three stakeholder authorities. The project has also secured £269,000 in funding over two years from Improvement East to cover the costs of implementation.
Aside from McNeill, the steering group overseeing the project consists of Philip Hyde, head of legal, regulatory and democratic services at Norwich, and Chris Skinner, head of central services at Great Yarmouth and an independent project manager.