As the Gazette reported this week, the government’s spending review, to report next month, will lead to substantial cuts in the ranks of the 2,000-strong Government Legal Service.The way these cuts are to be made points to future problems in maintaining the effectiveness of the GLS, and highlights problems in the way the GLS is structured and serves government.

First, there is a real issue around retaining the most skilled professionals. As is happening across the civil service, there will be many opportunities offered for voluntary redundancy. Those first in the queue tend to be the professionals who can most easily get another position elsewhere. Voluntary redundancy is the politically easy option (in both business and policy terms). But it takes away legal department heads’ ability to design the shape of team they need.

That lack of control plays in to a second point. Treasury Solicitor Paul Jenkins has said in the past that his ambition is to outsource the simpler instructions that can be commoditised, retaining in-house more strategic and demanding work. The logic is compelling, and matches the plan of many of the best general counsel in the private sector. But that would point to proportionately more cuts at the bottom of the GLS pyramid than the top – and this won’t happen. For example, on the evidence so far, SCS Grade 5 (deputy directors) will be cut before lower grades, and cut in proportion.

The third and most important issue surrounding indiscriminate cuts is a public interest one. A legal department focused on risk management starts not with a shopping list of the lawyers it wants, or the number it needs to lose, but the risks it needs to cover. Inadequate ‘coverage’ increases the risk of litigation, fraud, contracts that fail and so on – whereas adequate coverage can show a return on investment.

These points are not special pleading for government lawyers – GLS members don’t expect exemption from public spending cuts. But it’s worrying that no one in government or Whitehall has focused on what sort of reduced GLS would be fit for purpose. As the Gazette reported yesterday, the attorney general, notional head of the GLS, is taking no lead here. And though Tsol is seen as the senior player among the legal departments serving government, it has no role here either.

Related articles