It's the little things about Government that most bemuse me. Take the DTI, or what is now the Department for Business Enetrrpise and Regulatory Reform. They employ a total of 83 solicitors. 14 are senior civil servants, 65 are non senior civil servants and and 4 are legal trainees. Nothing wrong there I guess, big department, needs lawyers.
Yet, in 2004/05, they spent £4,427,415 on external legal advice. In 2005/06 it was £1,927,871, and then last year it was £4,576,382. So they've spent £10,931,668 on lawyers when they employ 83 of their own? Perhaps they should think about laying people off if they're not up to the job instead?
Let's be honest, the comparison in the title of the post sums it up really. Alternatively you could say it's a bit like buying a guard dog and then barking yourself.
10 comments:
That's either a very sad reflection upon their capabilities or a very sad reflection upon the amount of legal trouble they get into. Either way, something's not right.
83 solicitorsn who instruct barristers of which you list none. Doh!
Solicitors do not always instruct barristers.
83 lawyers ain't gonna be cheap. Figure £100k per head with all extra costs which makes an annual bill for in-house lawyers of £8.3 million.
Given that some of the outside advice will be from barristers, some from other specialists (and possibly foreign lawyers for ECGD loans), and that some times they will be very busy and have to call in outside advisers an extra £2-4 million doesn't sound too bad.
But 83 lawyers sounds a lot for the DTI.
Yes.
Much like buying a Four Wheel drive and then only using Two. ;)
Much like any other department. The civil servants won't or can't do anything vaguely useful, so use large sums of taxpayers money to bring in consultants and contractors. Ironically, these outsiders are often not much better than the time-servers they cover for. I hope the legal work was better value for money, but I wouldn't be very confident about that.
In a risk-averse culture, there will be a considerable tendency to seek Counsel's advice since that enables the solicitor to shift the blame if all goes pear-shaped. Since many, though by no means all (there being many fine lawyers in government service) of them are those who have failed in private practice, they are not about to foul the last nest they can make so a brief is shuffled off to Chambers and suitably Honorarium wings its way to the hardworking and professional barrister who has doubtless saved the day.
As to why they need so many of them, just ask any businessman who will give you not so much as a thumbnail sketch as a whole library of an explanation about the miles of red tape they generate every year, which probably gets put out to Counsel because they have no idea of the potential effect of what they have just drafted is going to be.
I reckon they should farm everything they can out to counsel. They might actually then be able to cut the establishment to the bone and still save money.
But then I have a somewhat scorched earth view of what we ought to be doing to the Civil Service.
Without knowing how much work the 83 lawyers do, it is impossible to judge whether they should be outsourcing work, but it is not uncommon for in-house lawyers in commercial organisations to be doing the same, in fact, part of their job is often to manage the process of instructing external lawyers (whether solicitors or barristers), ensure instructions are clear, scrutinise bills etc.
And I agree with the previous poster re the quality, although would add that most of the government lawyers (in Whitehall at least) I have met are highly competent - attracted by the more interesting work available in government, but drawing much smaller salaries than would be available in the private sector. You'd have to be very senior in the civil service as a lawyer to making £100k. Newly qualified lawyers in government earn about half of those in the private sector.
100k would be an average for all costs, NI, pensions, office space, consumables, secretarial support and other overheads for a government lawyer - i.e. all the costs that the government would be covering for an outside lawyer when you pay his/her bills. The goernment lawyer's salary would be only 60-70% of that figure.
My spouse was one of those solicitors (not DTI). Danvers sums it up nicely.
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