(a)

the Legal Services department had an involvement in many of the city’s activities including, amongst others, preparing contracts for construction works, highways initiatives and leisure services as well as providing comprehensive legal advice to council departments and partnership working with the University of Plymouth and the Courts Services;

(b)

there were a number of different teams and services within Legal Services, which included the Children and Young Peoples team, Commercial, Development and Corporate Services team, Community Services team, the HM Coroner and a business unit;

(c)

staffing levels within Legal Services had reduced by 25 per cent since 2006 and there was presently 53.8 full time or equivalent staff in the service;

(d)

Legal Services had a total budget of £3,029,700 which included a budget of £723,940 used by the HM Coroner;

(e)

the Legal Services department were part of a CIPFA benchmarking club that compared 59 local authorities.  Plymouth Legal Services were 36 per cent below the average for net cost per 1000 population and were 72 per cent below the average for costs bought in per 1000 population when compared against its 12 closest comparators;

(f)

some of the costs saved on major projects through undertaking legal work in-house were calculated as follows –

·         

the South West Devon Waste Partnership project had 1404 hours of legal time, which saved £215k in legal costs;

·         

the sale of Plymouth Citybus had 843 hours of legal time, which saved £129k in legal costs;

·         

the Plymouth Life Centre project had 1321 hours of legal time, which saved £202k in legal costs;

(g)

in the 2010 calendar year the Legal Services teams attended 974 court hearings. There was an increase from 2009 in childcare proceedings by 43 per cent and an increase in Environment, Trading Standards and Licensing proceedings by 60 per cent;

(h)

Legal Services had a very high success rate in court in 2010 with percentages of prosecutions as follows –

·         

Licensing, Trading Standards & Environment – 88 per cent success rate;

·         

Housing, Litigation, Debt Recovery and Anti-Social Behaviour  - 95 per cent success rate;

·         

Children’s Services – 99 per cent success rate;

(i)

a new case management system, which shared information between Children’s Services, the Courts Service and Legal Services, was introduced in 2010. Through the efficiency and effectiveness of this system the Legal Services teams were well equipped to deal with the increased workload and still maintain a high success rate in court prosecutions;

(j)

as a result of the case management system being utilised the time it took to complete child care cases had been reduced from an average of 59 weeks to 48 weeks, this had enabled legal services employees to have an increased capacity to deal with other projects;

(k)

Legal Services had over the past financial year recovered £209,280 to date, which was £80k over their target and a 50 per cent increase from costs recovered in 2009/10;

(l)

the Legal Services department was a Law Society Accredited Training Adviser and had an ISO 9001 Quality Accreditation, which was verified twice yearly by external verifiers;

(m)

customer satisfaction surveys were held regularly to ensure that customer needs were continuously being met. Over the past 12 months 98.6 per cent rated the service they received as good to excellent;

(n)

to further develop Legal Services, there was an aim to implement court bundling software, which would ensure an effective and efficient service would be provided as well as to improve data security with a reduction in paper copies;

(o)

the service also aimed to improve partnership working through the Devon Solicitors Group and the University of Plymouth, which would potentially increase income and deliver shared services.