Local authorities throughout Kent should combine their legal teams to give taxpayers better value for money, claims County Hall’s expert in the field.
Geoff Wild is the director of law and governance at Kent Legal Services, which currently serves about 200 public sector clients and pumps more than £1.5 million per year back into libraries, schools and other county council-run projects.
In less than a decade Mr Wild has helped turn KCC’s tiny legal department into a profitable, self-funding company attracting some of the world’s best solicitors, and he told KOS Media that merging with teams from other local authorities was the next step.
He said: “Ideally we want to see a Kent-wide legal service for the county because at the moment we have KCC, Medway Council and 12 district councils all running their own legal teams when there’s no need.
“What we need to do is get together and collaborate and have a central body that caters for the needs of all, and I think budgetary pressures are such that everyone is going to have to consider it.
“Not all the councils are welcoming it because they want to protect their own services but the barriers are going to have to come down in the future.”
Although Legal Services is part of KCC, it does not receive an annual budget from the council and must instead generate its own funds.
This means KCC must still pay for the legal advice it receives, albeit at a rate of about £60 per hour as opposed to the average £200 per hour quoted by London firms.
This, says Mr Wild, provides taxpayers with good value for money because the council then saves millions to spend on other areas.
The profit made by Legal Services is also pumped back into the authority every year.
To ensure the service remains competitive against firms in the private sector, it employs some of the best solicitors and barristers from across the globe.
A total of 17 languages – including Afrikaans, Cantonese, Samoan and Urdu – are spoken by a staff of about 80, of which about 60 per cent are female.
Mr Wild said: “The mix of people is something I take a lot of pride in, and not because I’m on some sort of political correctness mission to have a rainbow culture here.
“It’s simply that the best lawyers out there have varying backgrounds and experiences behind them.
“If we only employed white, middle-aged men from Middle England then we would have a very two-dimensional workforce with a static view of the world.
“By bringing in people who have worked in every continent, we can bring richness and diversity and something other than pure law.”
Mr Wild said one such employee – Pak Tim Fung – was currently working with Chinese investors to try to convince them to bring their businesses to Kent.
He added that the Legal Services team had also had a large part to play in some of the county’s biggest developments and innovations.
Mr Wild said: “From Bluewater to the Turner Contemporary and the Fast Track bus service in Dartford, we have touched virtually every part of Kent. We are invisible of course, but without us none of this would have happened.”
POSTED: 14/11/2009 11:00:00
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