Consultancy service
Academy conversions, service transfers, insourcing, outsourcing and redundancy programmes — with the consultation done properly and the paper trail built as you go.
Where it usually goes wrong
In our experience the substantive legal position on a transfer or a restructure is rarely the hard part. What causes problems is timetable compression: a decision is taken, a go-live date is announced publicly, and only then does anyone map backwards from that date through the consultation obligations. By the time HR is involved, the honest advice is that the announced date is not achievable without cutting a corner.
The most valuable thing we do on these programmes is get involved early enough to build the timetable forwards from the obligations rather than backwards from a press release. That is usually a matter of weeks of foresight and it saves months of remediation.
A programme plan with the consultation obligations mapped to dates. Employee liability information and due diligence support on both sides of a transfer. Measures identification and consultation with recognised unions or elected representatives. Selection pools and criteria that will withstand challenge. Consultation meeting scripts, letters and records. Individual consultation management. Appeals. And the complete documented bundle at the end, because the question “can you show us the consultation records” arrives eighteen months later, long after everyone involved has moved on.
Programme types
Conversions, trust joins and re-brokerage, where staff transfer with protections and the governance approvals sit across multiple bodies. Includes the interaction with continuity of service and pension arrangements, which is where questions cluster.
Contracted services moving in or out, or between providers, with employee liability information, measures consultation and harmonisation questions handled on the correct side of the line.
Reorganisations driven by budget or service redesign, including collective consultation where thresholds are met, selection pools, ring-fencing and redeployment.
Formal engagement with recognised unions and elected representatives, including where the relationship is already strained and the consultation needs to repair it as well as satisfy it.
Programme approach
STEP 01
Establish what is actually happening in legal terms, who is in scope, and what consultation duties are triggered. This determines everything after it.
STEP 02
Build the timetable forwards from those duties to a realistic go-live, and tell leadership early if the date they have in mind is not achievable.
STEP 03
Run the collective and individual consultation to the plan, with meetings scripted, minuted and recorded as they happen rather than reconstructed.
STEP 04
Implement, handle appeals, and hand over a complete documented bundle that someone can defend in two years without needing to ask you what happened.
FAQs
Before the go-live date is announced publicly, and ideally before it is decided internally. Once a date is in the public domain, the pressure to compress consultation becomes very difficult to resist, and compressed consultation is the single most common source of successful challenge.
A conversation at the options stage costs very little and routinely changes the programme plan for the better.
Talk to us at the options stage, not the announcement stage. A free 30-minute call usually changes the plan for the better.
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