Stuart Bain Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) is the national association of Scottish councils and acts as an employers' association for its 32 member authorities.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Policy work within COSLA's Employers' Team.

Lead Operational HR support for a Council Directorate (currently the Health and Social Care Partnership.)

Fife

In the last year I had led on procedural changes required by the adoption of self-service through our HR Payroll system (Midland iTrent) for a range of transactional activities: initially attendance management and leave booking. I have also retained responsibility as the policy lead on PVG and PSN Basic Disclosure checking. I also lead HR policy WTR holiday pay resulting from the Lock v British Gas ECJ and BEAR etc EAT outcomes.From the last quarter of 2012 through 2013 I again managed the recruitment team and led on PVG policy. I developed and managed the implementation of our retrospective PVG membership policy. This involved negotiation with our recognised unions because of a dispute about who should pay for membership (the Council or employees). I led development of an updated policy following briefing and discussion with the Council's senior management and political leadership. Through this period we also had to respond to a UK cabinet office requirement to meet the UK Government Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS). Essentially this required a programme of obtaining retrospective Basic Disclosures for employees not already checked to a higher standard.Through 2011 to 2012 I was seconded to our Corporate Services Directorate supporting a number of Business Partner Type organisational development activities. These included coaching the IT Service Management Team, facilitating the IT Service Workforce plan and roll-out of our Corporate Learning Management System (CLMS). Towards the end of this secondment I developed and ran and assessment/development centre for IT Lead Officers.From June 2010 to September 2011 I worked in our HR Direct section on a range or recruitment issues, primarily related to the implementation of our centralised recruitment team (10 case officers and 2 HR Assistants, who I managed) and the myjobscotland recruitment portal, but also involving recruitment restrictions, PVG implementation, and employability initiatives.

Fife

My main duties were working on HR policies and equalities. I led teams of stakeholders in developing, updating and briefing of new or evolving policies. Stakeholders include senior managers, Union reps, and fellow professionals (legal, pensions, finance, HR practitioners.) I was responsible for a range of corporate employee relations issues, e.g. coordinating the response to industrial action. I was responsible for structuring and presenting HR advice including on our intranet and internet. Between 2003 and 2008 I developed our intranet based HR information resource (HR Direct).I developed and maintained the Council’s policies including discipline, equality of opportunity, overseas criminal conviction checking, referrals to the DWCL, SSSC etc, early retirement, discretionary leave, preventing illegal working, flexible working, the employee code of conduct, and redundancy compensation arrangements. I advised on non-routine operational matters. E.g. the Stringer case, swine flu, severe weather arrangements and public holidays. I advised in a number of complex disciplinary and grievance cases where it was appropriate to involve an HR professional not previously directly involved. I have supervised teams ranging in size from two to sixteen. From Jan 09 to April 09 I was acting team leader for the combined HR Strategy and OD Teams. I frequently acted as a mentor or induction partner for new colleagues.

Fife

Corporate employee relations work: this also included operational HR procedures development and modification in response to legislative and work practice changes. My duties included project based work on Council wide operational HR issues. Significant projects included the SCRO check criminal conviction check working group (group leader), severe weather working group, medical referrals procedure, attendance management work and annualising pay for term time employees.I identified that the HR Service did not have an established process for sharing and retaining expertise internally. I was told that there had been work done to develop a paper based handbook to address this which was moribund. I initiated and became originator and group leader of the information support group developing our HR knowledge management resource and developing our HR Handbook into an MS Word document residing on a shared server with clickable contents page, internal and external hyperlinks in the text, cross references and an automatically generated index.I also was responsible for responding to industrial action, and supporting the HR Manager with benchmarking and research

Diphrm, Human Resource Management

Ba Hons, English Literature