In-house: the Government Legal Service

I feel fortunate to have found my way into the Government Legal Service (GLS), which three-and-a-half decades on continues to deliver on its original promise as a career.

In 1975, at the end of my legal studies, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I got some career advice: ‘You like a mix of practical and academic law, you believe in public service and you like politics with a small "p", so you ought to think about working as a lawyer in government.’ I had never heard of the GLS but I took the advice, which to me felt spot-on. Ten weeks later, I found myself entering legal Whitehall through a door opposite the Cenotaph and beginning training in the legal adviser’s branch of the Home Office.

The GLS comprises all lawyers who work for central government. There are just under 2,000 of us, about three-quarters of whom are solicitors and a quarter barristers. The career prospectus of the GLS offers variety both at any one time and over a career. Much of our work is of general interest and all of it, we would say, is in the public interest. Although the word ‘unique’ can be overused, much of our legal work is indeed unique in the sense that it is not found elsewhere. And the combination of this work and the ability to move jobs within and between government departments adds to the uniqueness.

I have worked with several departments and in five of these have been at head lawyer level. When I began in the Home Office, I spent a lot of time with ministers and in parliament working on the preparation and passage of legislation on the criminal law, including formulations of the law of conspiracy and criminal attempt. One of my bills set up the Crown Prosecution Service and another reformed the official secrets law.

The most exciting - in terms of its parliamentary passage - was a bill to enable the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, which was passed by the Commons and thrown out by the Lords. It eventually became the first bill to proceed through parliament under the Parliament Act since the Second Parliament Act. During this time, I was also producing advice and legislation on prisons and prisoners. This included advice on the tariffs of life-sentence prisoners - a defence in Strasbourg of our legal regime for discretionary lifers (Myra Hindley was one). There was an early measure to allow for the privatisation of prisons, and another for dealing with prison riots and their aftermath.

On loan from the Home Office to the Attorney General’s Office, I was a member of the team which handled the Spycatcher litigation. I also briefed the attorney on the legal acceptability of parliamentary bills which formed the government’s legislative programme, something which helped me to understand how the government machine worked across the piece.

My first big promotion was to head the legal team at the Office of Fair Trading, where we handled competition and consumer law. Highlights included dawn raids and anti-cartel activity. We wished we had stronger powers - these arrived some years after I moved from the OFT to head the Ministry of Defence legal team. The big issues at the time included gays in the military (mainly from the human rights angle) and women on the frontline (where the issues were mainly EU ones). I also worked on the drafting of a confidentiality contract for the special forces, which was challenged (unsuccessfully) in New Zealand courts and up to the Privy Council.

When I moved over to be deputy treasury solicitor - my first director general post - I became involved for the first time in the management of a large government legal department - the Treasury Solicitor’s Department - where my preoccupations included the recruitment of lawyers, their career development, and ensuring the posting of the right lawyers to the right places at the right times. I also had the privilege of setting up a new civil panel system for the then attorney general, which still works today and provides a better and fairer distribution of government legal work among the junior bar.

My next move was to become solicitor and director general of legal services to the department then known as the Department of Trade and Industry. Here the most public legal issue concerned the collapse of MG Rover in 2005, which, because it happened during an election period, was guaranteed a slot at the top of the evening news every night. During this time, it became necessary to reduce the size of the legal team by 20%, a challenge which, although painful, we saw as an opportunity to develop a style of working, which we called Working Smarter. This involved a higher focus on meeting the needs of clients, on integrating a risk-based approach into our advice, and on closer planning of work with clients.

Billions at stake

I came to HM Revenue & Customs in 2008 for the most demanding of my GLS jobs. My legal teams here work on the legal content of the budget and on the production of the resulting Finance Bill and the underpinning subordinate legislation. We give tax and other advice appropriate to a large department such as HMRC. This is all the more demanding now that tax has become a political issue in recent times. We also handle the department’s top-end litigation, a body of about 9,000 cases which amount to the largest and heaviest litigation in the country in terms of pound signs.

Our cases are regularly heard in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court - and I like to sit in on them whenever I can. We follow continuous improvement strategies, such as Lexcel accreditation, where we strive for better results each year. By practising one’s profession within the GLS in different departments and in different subject areas, we deepen our knowledge of public law in its widest sense, including not just judicial review, but also constitutional and administrative law, law-making, EU law, human rights and international law. We widen too our knowledge of commercial and employment law, in a government context, and we develop a wider knowledge of how the government machine works in all its different aspects. Part of the skill of the lawyer lies in not just knowing or understanding the law but also in knowing how to get things done.

Of course, one of the great things is that there is always a lot more to learn within the GLS. No one has all the answers. In the GLS, we work together in teams within departments, and we also form inter-departmental groupings on cross-cutting subjects such as freedom of information, employment law and many others, to ensure that the legal advice to government is consistent wherever it is given. In the rare situations where departments cannot agree with each other on legal advice, the attorney general will be available as a referee.

Although I am proud to be a barrister, I have spent all of my legal life working in an organisation where barristers and solicitors are trained together and are used interchangeably on all tasks, from law-making to litigation. My sympathies are with the concept of a fused profession, in which everyone enjoys the same basic training but then some move on to more specialised work, such as advocacy.

To me, it is a source of pride that I began life as a government trainee and that as training principal I have steered the training of close on a hundred GLS trainees.

So what of the future for the GLS? The core work we do will always likely to need to be done. Indeed, if one compared our core work with a toy box, government is continually treating us by throwing new toys into the box - be that human rights, devolution or freedom of information - in addition to the toy which was given in the early 1970s, which has grown significantly from the days in which it was called ‘common market law’ to the EU law of today. The strength of the GLS in the past - and I would claim for the future too - has been the high quality of its people, coupled with their flexibility and adaptability. For the future, legal challenges are likely to broaden and deepen in an ever more demanding and questioning political environment.

There will be an even stronger emphasis on how we meet those challenges, including through smarter, risk-based working at pace, ensuring that when we say ‘no’ to something there is an increased emphasis on ‘you can’t do it that way, but if you approached it like this...’

As to ways of working, the opportunities for part-time working and other alternative working patterns have increased. Around 20% of the GLS is working other than full-time, five days a week in the office. I would expect alternative working patterns to grow, especially with the development of more flexible IT and information, and document management systems. Another relevant factor is the level of client knowledge and understanding of legal matters.

This differs from department to department. In HMRC, we are lucky to have clients who, legally, are highly literate, but over the years our clients in government have become less knowledgeable about the basics of the law and the constitution, so surrendering ground to lawyers which was occupied by our clients many years ago.

Following this trend, some of our lawyers will be contemplating a wish to broaden their own careers into policy or operational areas and whether they can combine these moves with remaining in the legal stream or not. The people who will come to the fore will be the excellent lawyers who ‘work smart’ and are ready to adapt to, understand and influence the changing needs of our clients. Even though the public service has taken a bashing in the past couple of years, I see the ideal of public service as vital to the future, and I see the GLS as continuing to be attractive to lawyers who want important and varied work, with a strong public interest dimension.

Anthony Inglese is general counsel and solicitor for HM Revenue & Customs