Councils can often find themselves with a short term gap in their resources due to the resignation of the Clerk, RFO or other officers, or absence due to sickness, maternity or paternity leave or other reason. At these times it is often difficult to find a suitable temporary replacement with the right skills and experience to do the job, who is available immediately and is based close to hand. However, unless such replacements can be found quickly, council activities can grind to a halt, financial or legal risks can arise, or important project work is not carried out.
LGRC has a network of well-qualified locums across the country and we can provide locum services in your area to meet your specific need. Our locums are very experienced and qualified Local Council Clerks and other officers who know what needs to be done and can ‘hit the ground running’. Locums can be made available for just a few weeks or, in some cases, a year or longer, part time or full time.
Benefits of LGRC’s Service
In dealing with LGRC, councils are procuring a locum service and not just procuring a locum:
- LGRC will support all your Council’s temporary needs and, in the event that your locum falls sick or is otherwise unable to work, we will undertake to provide a replacement.
- LGRC’s locum network enables us to access a wide range of skills and experience, sometimes an acknowledged national expert in their field. Our locums are able to call on this resource in the event that there are specific issues within the council that need to be addressed, be they in relation to governance, finance, HR community relations, asset transfer, planning or any other matter
- In procuring locums, councils as public bodies now have to comply with HMRC’s new IR35 tax rules. LGRC will manage all these issues for you and certify that this is being done so that there are no employment issues to manage and the Council just receives an invoice for work done at an agreed daily rate – LGRC takes care of all the necessary employment and tax related matters
How does the Locum Service work?
- Where a locum requirement arises you contact us with details of your Council and the required role, a description of the role in question and ideally a person specification. We also need to know the desired hours of work and the length of time that it is anticipated that a locum will be required for. It is sometimes difficult to know how long it will be and we can generally be flexible to meet this need, but an estimate at this stage will help us to identify the right person.
- We will look for suitable candidates and provide you with details including the daily rate(s) that we would charge. Locums generally cost rather more than permanent staff because of the additional flexibility that they provide, the temporary nature of the work, and the degree of difficulty in working for short periods in new environments. The skills required to do this are different from those of a longer term employee in a steady role. However, they invariably provide very good value for money because they are productive immediately they start work, and often bring new skills which are of great benefit to the Council.
- Once you have met the locum(s) that we propose and you give us the go-ahead, they should be able to start work immediately or within a very short time. They will keep a timesheet which they will submit to the Council for signature each week before returning to us. We ask for an initial deposit to ensure that we can pay locums in a timely manner and we then invoice you monthly for the time the locum spends working with the Council.