Governance, Procurement and Information

Governance and decision-making right should be a core priority in any organisation and especially so where sector regulators are looking for best practice and penalising anything less and legal challenges by individuals and other organisations are increasingly common. Our governance experience extends from registered providers in the housing sector in all their forms including complex groups through maintained, academy, free and private schools to all varieties of charities and social enterprise organisations. We also regularly advise on joint ventures, partnership working and contractual relationships between parties of all kinds including private businesses, charities, housing and education providers.

Procurement has specific legal rules which apply to public bodies in many circumstances and should not be ignored. Even when they are not strictly applicable, funding terms and the governing documents of many organisations require a proper process to make sure there is value for money achieved without conflicts of interest, corruption or unacceptable risks. We support organisations in all sectors and on both ends of the procurement process from the design and initiation of a project through creating documents, managing the process and making the final decision, as well as dealing with any challenges or disputes that arise.

Our experience and knowledge in establishing effective contractual solutions (including bespoke document production whenever needed) supports our procurement work and commonly includes development and construction contracts and their ancillary documents, IT project contracts and the full range of outsourcing and resource sharing.

Information law is increasingly important with the introduction of GDPR and the new Data Protection Act alongside the growing impact of Freedom of Information and Environmental Information rules. Our experience in all sectors covers assessing the state of an organisation's existing arrangements, working with policies and procedures to create a compliant solution and assisting with interactions with individuals and other organisations including subject access requests, information sharing agreements and processing agreements. In the event of a data security breach or investigation by the ICO we can assist in initial responses and interaction with the Commissioner. Many organisations have to appoint a Data Protection Officer under GDPR and we can fulfil that role or provide tailored support to an in-house DPO to allow them to operate effectively.