Indiscriminate cuts pose threat to legal professional standards, warns SLG chairman

Cutbacks in local government – and in particular the way they are being implemented by some councils – are posing a threat to lawyers’ professional standards, the chairman of Solicitors in Local Government has warned.

In an interview ahead of this year’s Weekend School at Exeter, Steve Turner told Local Government Lawyer that with workloads increasing but resources diminishing, this threat was a live issue.

“My principal concern – speaking generally and not personally – is that there still needs to be a recognition by employers that local authority solicitors are externally regulated and work to externally enforced professional standards,” he said.

“It would be not only remiss but an erroneous course were the employers to place their employed solicitors in a position where they could not comply with those standards. That threatens the professional integrity of the individual and is wrong, fundamentally wrong.”

Turner added: “There has got to come a point where the solicitor says no – that he or she cannot personally do something in the way or with the resources provided by the employer because it would breach the professional standards in such a way that their integrity would be undermined.”

The SLG chairman said this manifested itself in several ways and varied enormously from council to council, depending on how authorities have approached their budgetary problems.

“The council that purely ‘salami slices’ without thinking is going to run into more problems than the council that actually analyses the effect of what is proposed and is prepared to vary the thickness of the slice if you like, according to the need to ensure that the service is delivered to the proper standards,” he warned.

Some authorities have not even carried out an analysis of what services they had to continue to deliver and what services they had a discretion to deliver. “They have just salami sliced irrespective and that is worrying,” Turner continued. “For the individual solicitor, this means: ‘Am I going to have the facilities available to me to actually carry out the job I need to do in the way that it should be done?’.

“That is the biggest worry, and that is setting aside entirely personal concerns about job security and family. It is a difficult place to be.”

In the interview Turner – a solicitor at Hull City Council – also comments on the status of lawyers in local authority decision-making, the possibilities thrown up by alternative business structures, the importance of knowledge-sharing and SLG’s relationship with the Law Society.

Read the interview in full here.

Philip Hoult