Corporate report

Delivery of our key priorities

Published 9 June 2022

Leadership

Improve our leadership at all levels by developing and embedding a leadership framework with clear standards linked to progression and retention, with a shared expectation, confidence and accountability.

Action	Progress
Improve the capability of our staff through ongoing investment in training, including ‘Leadership the GLD way’.	We developed our leadership framework, ‘Leadership the GLD Way’, which embeds the Civil Service leadership behaviours in our own leadership training and practices. This was rapidly amended to enable virtual delivery through periods of working from home. Over 400 GLD employees undertook more than 40 Leadership the GLD Way training sessions. GLD supported Beyond Boundaries, a cross-government talent programme for grades AASEO, and the Civil Service Future Leaders (17 participants) and Senior Leaders Schemes (1 participant). GLD set aside funded places for Beyond Boundaries which were taken up by ethnic minority and disabled colleagues, and colleagues from low socio-economic status backgrounds. Ten colleagues entered the first cohort.
By 31 March 2022, improve our staff survey score for Leadership and Managing Change, to at least 62%.	While we did not meet our target of 62%, our score for Leadership and Managing Change remained positive at 56% in a year of unprecedented change, as we continued to deliver the outstanding legal services to government which are the hallmark of GLD.

Case study: Diversity in decision making

The Diversity in Decision Making review was one of the actions included in the ‘Top Ten Actions on Race’ published in 2020, following the death of George Floyd. It was originally intended to be a short term review over the summer looking specifically at diversity on GLD’s Board and committees.

However, following GLD wide consultation it was quickly identified that there are were a range of areas throughout the department that would benefit from the review. In the spirit of what it was intended to achieve, a diverse group of colleagues from across GLD worked together to make recommendations and decisions on positive changes to bring to GLD.

Led by the Strategy and Governance Team the review saw immediate improvements, such as changes to governance processes and procedures to confirm the engagement of diverse groups before a paper was taken to the Board. 2021-2022 has seen the work expand even further with some exciting changes.

There has been the appointment of an independent member to the Talent and Succession Committee, the committee that deals with recruitment, retention and promotion. Membership of the committees has been expanded from Directors to a seat open to colleagues of all grades and the relaunch of a group of colleagues within GLD who provide a ‘safe space’ under the new name of Culture and Behaviour Champions.

Work on improvements to impact the day-to-day decision making of leaders in GLD will shortly be presented to the Executive Committee. The next steps following this will be a ‘one year on’ exercise to measure the impact of the changes across the department.

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Be Recognised

Be recognised across the Civil Service, and externally, as a leading employer in relation to diversity and inclusion and wellbeing.

Action	Progress
Continue to implement our Diversity and Inclusion Delivery Plan, to further enhance inclusion within GLD, including our Top Ten Actions on Race.	GLD has built on its Top Ten Actions on Race, holding conversations and staff events across the department. The Board received diversity and inclusion training and our Executive Team published diversity and inclusion objectives. * GLD’s gender pay gap is nearly zero and the median bonus gap improved from 27% in 2020 to 5% in 2021. * Our inclusion score in the 2021 People Survey has increased by 2% to 85%. Members of under-represented groups have been invited to and joined GLD’s Committees, with work ongoing to ensure we reflect a diversity of thought and experience in our decision making. The Talent and Succession Committee reviewed various talent schemes (Stepping into Leadership, Future Leaders Scheme and Senior Leaders Scheme) available to our colleagues, and provided oversight to ensure we took advantage of these schemes to further our ambition for GLD to be a truly inclusive employer. * Our Culture and Behaviour Champions rolled-out “Call It Out” training, empowering colleagues to deal with bullying and inappropriate behaviour. * We trained 50 ‘Inclusion in Action’ facilitators, and developed training on ‘Constructive Conversations’. We undertook substantial work considering our response to the changes to the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) and paralegal roles across GLD, discussing shared challenges, risks and opportunities and aligning our approaches across the Government Legal Profession. GLD will implement a more coherent, consistent approach to paralegal roles in 2022-23, alongside the development of Paralegal Career Pathways. As part of our ongoing Early Talent work, GLD worked in partnership with Aspiring Solicitors, Bridging the Bar, the Law Society Diversity Access Scheme and Social Mobility Foundation to welcome almost 200 undergraduate students through the Government Legal Diversity Summer Scheme. We took part in the Life at the Employed Bar session at the Bar Council’s Pupillage Fair 2021. We undertook the third year review of our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, engaging with Diversity Champions, Diversity Network Chairs, local Diversity and Inclusion Representatives and Trade Union Representatives from across GLD. This will inform our refresh of the Strategy which will be published in mid-2022. The GLD Health and Wellbeing Action Plan was refreshed for 2021-22 as we supported colleagues during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We developed a comprehensive suite of guidance and training covering a wide range of support, including on resilience and managing stress, and continued to promote such initiatives as our network of Mental Health First Aiders to ensure support was available to colleagues who might need it.
By 31 March 2022, to have made further progress on our aim that ethnic minority staff will account for 25% of our Senior Civil Service workforce, and disabled staff 19%.	As at March 2022 14% of GLD’s Senior Civil Servants (SCS) are ethnic minorities, while 9% of our SCS are declared as disabled. These are both significantly higher than the Civil Service averages (8% and 6% respectively). However, more progress is needed, and GLD is committed to refreshing its Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to ensure it reflects the progress we’ve made but also widening areas of focus.
Implement the recommendations of GLD’s first Sustainability Action Plan 2021-22 by 31 March 2022.	Good progress has been made on the implementation of the Sustainability Action Plan, including: exceeding our Greening Government Commitments; there is a Green Champion at Board level; over 330 members of staff have subscribed to the Greener GLD Network; a sustainability audit to help inform the environmental impacts of return to the office was conducted in February 2022; and we have established a climate change and environmental law strand to GLD’s training offer and are promoting other means to share knowledge like the Centres of Excellence.

Case study: Government Legal Profession Race to the Top Network

It has been almost a year since the Government Legal Profession Race to the Top Network (the GLP branch of the Civil Service Race to the Top Network) was established, and that year has been an industrious and engaging one. With a current membership of approximately 250 members, the Network’s overarching aim is to assist G6/G7 lawyers from ethnic minority backgrounds to thrive and progress, helping to address underrepresentation in the SCS.

Prior to its launch event on 18 May 2021, it conducted a detailed survey of government lawyers from ethnic minority backgrounds to understand the barriers to career progression experienced. Over 100 responses were received from across the GLP, including GLD, and analysis of them was presented at the launch event.

The Network has a practical focus on career progression and over the year has heard from prominent GLP figures who shared their career stories with members and gave advice on how to succeed. The Network has close links with other GLD networks, including the Race Network and African and Caribbean Connections Network, collaborating to organise and host a panel session on how to successfully navigate the GLD Grade 6 Senior Lawyer Campaign.

Following focus group sessions with members in October 2021, over the course of 2022 the Network plans to roll-out 4 priority projects, including workshops on drafting excellent applications and acing promotion interviews, as part of its theme of the year: “Climbing the GLP Promotion Ladder”.

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Improved Offer

Put in place an improved offer to attract, retain, reward and develop the talented people we need to be an outstanding organisation.

Action	Progress
Review how we can improve our offer, profile and recruitment processes (including by looking at options and opportunities to raise GLD’s external presence) to meet the resourcing challenges that we face in an increasingly flexible and competitive legal market.	A wider pay strategy is being developed to support a refreshed business case for a more substantive, long term improvement in pay for all. The GLD Executive Committee approved changes to our approach to claiming overtime and the selling of annual leave. Recruiting sufficient lawyers to meet the demands of GLD’s clients across government has continued to be a challenge. An external review of our resourcing approach and processes was undertaken, with findings to be implemented in 2022-23, alongside an internal review of outreach activity to inform a new GLD Outreach Strategy. In 2021 we doubled the number of targeted campaigns from 2020, and implemented diverse interview panels as part of our recruitment process.
Provide increased opportunities, enhanced leadership and better career development for our staff.	In 2021 we implemented GLD’s new approach to talent management and succession planning, Development for All, supporting colleagues to build a breadth and depth of skills and knowledge, and ensuring that we enable people who have the ambition and skills to progress to our most senior roles. In addition to enhancements for non-legal professionals in GLD we are also developing professional offerings for corporate personnel, including our Business Management community (who work directly with our legal teams). We have recently delivered a programme providing a clearer pathway for their careers and through the greater application of cross-Civil Service functional standards and development opportunities.
Improve our access to larger and more diverse talent pools by increasing the number of roles based outside London to 250 or 11% by 31 March 2022.	In September 2021 we relocated our Leeds office to a new modern building at Wellington Place to target the growth of our footprint in the city. After a successful pilot which saw 7% of our roles being based outside London, we have continued to make progress in our regionalisation, in order to access talent pools outside of London. We increased the number of roles based outside London to 207 by 31 March 2022.

Connected

Increase our numbers outside London whilst operating as a fully integrated department, connected across our many sites within and outside London and exploiting the opportunities technology provides to enhance the working experience of our staff and the quality of our service for clients.

Action	Progress
Increase our regional presence including the further development of our Leeds and Bristol offices, and by raising our profile in areas outside of London.	Our Accommodation and Location Strategy originally set a target of 40% of roles (900) based outside central London by 2024. Given significant external constraints, such as the reduced availability of government office space offered by the Government Property Agency, we have had to scale back our initial ambition. However, in September 2021, we relocated our Leeds office to a brand-new development in Wellington Place with space for up to 300 staff. We have also expanded our current Bristol office in Rivergate from 6 to 36 desks. Our revised target is to fully populate the regional accommodation we have secured to date, by March 2024. At a hybrid working ratio of 40%, this equates to a target of 500 roles in Leeds, Bristol and Croydon (against the current 207).
Align with the Government’s Levelling-Up agenda and associated plans to move jobs out of London.	We continued to offer flexible ways of working in line with business needs, and provided the necessary equipment and training to enable staff to work at home for part of the week where possible. All GLD staff requiring the ability to work remotely now have access to GLD systems, from home or other remote locations. We are continuing to refine the experience and have begun the migration to Microsoft 365 and Teams.

Case Study: Future Ways of Working Project

In 2021, Susanna McGibbon commissioned GLD’s Flexible Working Champions Jane Hill and Anne McGaughrin to lead a task and finish group to support the Board in setting direction for GLD’s future ways of working. Informed by engagement across the business the group looked strategically at how the series of important decisions GLD faced in relation to accommodation location technology and working patterns could be set against a clear vision of our future business model, embracing learning from the pandemic and taking on board the wider changes in the modern Civil Service.

Focusing on 3 “strands” – the needs of our business, our clients and our people – the group conducted an extensive survey of our people’s preferences and views, engaged with clients and others in the legal community and challenged assumptions about our working models.

Diversity and inclusion considerations were incorporated within every aspect of the group’s work, and the group proactively sought to integrate and learn from other GLD workstreams, including Reimagining the Workplace and the Diversity in Decision Making Task and Finish Group.

GLD’s Executive Committee accepted the group’s recommendations, under which the direction is set that our people should come together regularly in GLD offices and hubs to work collaboratively with a ‘critical mass’ of people with a mixed range of experience and expertise; that GLD develop a national career offer whereby nearly all our roles can be filled from any GLD base; that GLD should continue to promote location neutrality, expanding outside of London with a limited number of GLD bases supporting the full range of expert services; and that the client-facing team model should remain a cornerstone of our business. Achieving this long-term vision will take some time but we are now actively moving in this direction.

Case Study: Move to Wellington Place

In line with the Government’s Levelling Up and Places for Growth agendas and GLD’s strategic Connected outcome, Accommodation undertook an office relocation from Leeds Lateral to a new multi-occupancy HMRC Hub at Wellington Place, cementing our presence in the north of England.

By increasing the size of the office floorplate, the provision of desks were doubled allowing up to 300 staff to be pointed to the building – allowing us to more than double office capacity from Lateral numbers, enabling the available roles outside of London to be expanded.

Being a brand new building, the environment has been specifically designed to facilitate new working styles and subsequently supports GLD’s Future Ways of Working recommendations of hybrid working and utilising the office for increased collaboration. The facilities are modern with a range of formal and collaborative areas and include a dedicated conferencing centre. There are also a range of wellbeing and environmental features included, ranging from beekeeping, extensive cycle-to-work provisions and urban gardens.

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Capability

Enhance the capability and capacity of our staff through the operation of a fully integrated digital knowledge management system accessible to all throughout GLD, an enhanced training offer through the use of digital delivery platforms alongside traditional techniques and the further development of gld.digital.

Action	Progress
Improve our capacity and capability through ongoing investment in the skills of our people and the further development and deployment of technology.	We continued to plot an ambitious future path for the enhancement of GLD’s capability, informed by our experience and learning through the COVID-19 pandemic, and further developing our specialist knowledge, learning and innovation capability. We established the Knowledge, Capability and Innovation Group and reviewed and strengthened core resources, including induction for lawyers, Being an Effective Government Lawyer and Introductory Course for Government Lawyers, as well as our Centres of Excellence and knowledge and learning networks. We have put in place a GLD innovation blueprint and an innovation programme to begin to make a desired step change in this area.
By 31 March 2022, our eKM (knowledge management system) will be readily accessible by all our lawyers wherever they are located.	Just under 1,500 lawyers had access to and were using our eKM knowledge sharing system by March 2022. By the time the roll-out is complete in June 2022, there will be over 1,800 users.

Case Study: eKM

eKM is GLD’s online legal knowledge sharing system. It is a key element of the Capability strand of GLD’s 2019-2024 Strategy. It gives our lawyers a single location to access legal knowledge from teams across GLD which enhances collaboration and work efficiency. It also enables new joiners to get up to speed more quickly.

A multidisciplinary project team from GLD’s Knowledge, Capability and Innovation Group, Digital, Data and Technology profession (DDaT) and Change have partnered with individual teams’ knowledge management leads to roll-out eKM throughout 2021. After trial roll-outs with selected early adopter teams, eKM was launched to around 350 lawyers in our Litigation Group in July 2021. After a short review period over the summer, the roll-out pace increased rapidly. By the end of March 2022, 12 Divisions and 6 Centres of Excellence had access – around 1,500 colleagues.

User feedback has been incredibly positive with comments describing eKM as intuitive and easy to use. Colleagues have also found the rollout process to be ‘really efficient’ praising the project team’s organisation and helpfulness.

When the initial roll-out concludes in June 2022, around GLD 1,800 colleagues will have access to over 2,500 knowledge items. eKM will then be managed and further developed as part of GLD’s knowledge and learning systems roadmap.

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Professionalise

Professionalise and modernise all aspects of our service, both corporate and legal services, using a ‘fail fast/learn quickly’ approach to encourage innovation.

Action	Progress
Continue to improve the legal service we provide to our clients (including reviewing the legal risk framework and its use by ministers, officials and lawyers), support the Attorney General in their role as the principal legal adviser to government and sponsor of the Government Legal Department, and improve our relationship and support of the wider Government Legal Profession. Continue to provide high quality and value for money legal services to our clients.	We restructured our legal directorates into 3 areas, designing them to reflect government priorities and the context in which we are delivering the Strategy. Each legal directorate is headed by a Director General (DG) and are known as Litigation with Justice and Security, Commercial with Trade and International and Employment with Economic Recovery and UK Governance. We established a Ministerial Strategic Board, chaired by the Attorney General, which met in July 2021 and January 2022. We developed plans to review our approach to legal risk. We set out our plans for engaging with the Government Legal Profession and wider legal profession. A strategic project on Business Management support provided to legal teams was undertaken,to create a new and improved structure and career path for the profession. * The first phase of the project has been successfully implemented, and implementation of the second phase has commented. This has allowed colleagues to work more flexibly and share skills and good practice across the whole department. * We created a new Head of Profession for Business Management.
Provide effective and timely legal advice, which supports our clients’ Outcome Delivery Plans (ODPs).	GLD lawyers and the wider Government Legal Profession continued to provide high quality legal advice to government: not only to support the delivery of their ODPs, but also to provide rapid, high calibre, responsive support to ministers and officials. We provided key support in the Government’s most high profile areas: the COVID-19 response and establishment of the Inquiry, Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations, Small Boats/ migration, and energy and supply chain resilience, as well as COP26. We implemented a new time recording system for our advisory, including commercial advisory, legal teams.
Undertake Non-Executive Director (NED) led reviews of our relationship and service delivery to clients.	We have NED led deep dives in train. Three deep dives were conducted in the 2021-22 financial year, covering: the Legal Advisers to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Department for International Trade and Department for Work and Pensions. Findings were presented to the Legal Delivery Committee.
Aim for an overall client satisfaction score of 95%.	Our latest client satisfaction score was 96% (this is the number of clients who found our service Excellent or Good). We intend to make changes to the GLD client satisfaction survey to take in Ministerial feedback and to align with Cabinet Office reporting requirements on functional efficiency.
Development of the Outline Business Case for what the Business Transformation Programme (BTP) will aim to deliver by 31 March 2022.	GLD has established the BTP to drive the modernisation of our systems, technology and processes. The aims of the BTP have been identified as: * to invest in all of GLD’s people and its culture, ensuring we all have the skills and career opportunities in an ever more inclusive environment * to modernise how we do things at GLD, through improved corporate processes and through innovation, technology and knowledge sharing * to continue to enhance how we work alongside our departmental and ministerial clients and provide them with outstanding, resilient legal services at enhanced value for money. Following the early mobilisation stages of the programme and initial conclusions, the GLD Board chose to focus the initial stages of the programme on finalising the delivery of an Overall Plan which would provide the system and tools to underpin an enhanced delivery and portfolio management approach within GLD, including for programmes and projects being delivered under the auspices of BTP. The Board also chose to focus the programme on GLD’s future technology requirements, including the introduction at pace of enhanced capability through Microsoft 365 to enhance collaboration and connectivity across GLD. As a result the Board judged that there was no requirement for an overall Outline Business Case and that the BTP would continue to provide the platform and catalyst through which individual projects and programmes (including those which may individually require business cases) would be run to help achieve the BTP’s aims and GLD’s wider strategic outcomes. The programme is continuing with strong progress on near term technology enhancements in GLD and on delivery of GLD’s Overall Plan.