Holding court

Catering in the law courts is like catering in a theatre, says Lesley Pyne, departmental contracts manager in the procurement department of the Court Service. Most people are visitors, she says, supported by a few permanent staff, and as each case finishes, the players - judges, jurors, advocates and the parties directly involved - pack up and leave like a travelling theatre company.

And, like the theatre, the court has rules about who goes where, who can talk to whom - and even who can sit down and eat with whom. There are regular hours and when people break for lunch it tends to be a short break for a light snack.

But conditions can change suddenly. A jury may be enrolled for what looks like a three-day trial but, if the defendant pleads guilty, they will all be sent home before lunch on the first day.

The court catering department has often been treated like the poor relation, tucked away at the wrong end of an uninviting corridor and dovetailed in with the main business. But, done well, it can improve the efficiency of the main business.

Before 1996, catering at the 70 or so courts in England and Wales supervised by the Courts Service was managed by about 20 caterers operating cost-plus-management-fee contracts - one for each court. In 1994-95 a survey of attitudes to court catering indicated patchy quality and poor value.

The level of subsidy varied from one court to another. "We felt that economies of scale could be achieved in purchasing and standardised menus if we went for fewer contracts," says Pyne.

The procurement department consulted colleagues within the Court Service and took advice from catering consultancy Tricon. "We made the decision that bigger was going to be better, though there was some opposition to that from within the service," says head of the procurement unit Ken Cooney.

Rather than inviting tenders for one contract for all 70 courts, the service decided to divide the market into four regions, and put each region out to tender separately. There was plenty of competition for each of the four tenders, which were duly commissioned between November 1996 and November 1997. The winners of the five-year service level agreement contracts, all of which had previously held court contracts, were Halliday Catering Services, Link Catering Management Services, Sutcliffe Catering Services and Avenance (formerly known as Brian Smith, but renamed since being bought by French contractor Elior in April).

The regions have different characteristics - London and the North include some very big courts, while the Midlands has a larger number of smaller ones - but each region generates a similar catering sales figure of between £1.2m and £1.6m a year.

The service is subsidised in that the Court Service underwrites the staff overheads. The caterers are required to generate a margin on the sale of food, the lion's share of which is returned to the client to reduce the cost of the subsidy. The caterers would not disclose the target margin, but it seems to be about 60% of sales at the till.

The four caterers also responded to the tender document with some common approaches, such as branded beverage and pastry operations and a range of light meals, sandwiches and snacks. "Quality pub-grub-style menus" is how Paul Stevens of Link describes it, and that reflects all four contractors' offerings.

Clive Smith, chairman of Avenance, calls it the coffee-shop approach, offering "high-quality beverages and snacks". Contrary to the traditional picture of a judge tucking into a roast joint with all the trimmings, the judges often choose salads and light snacks. Advocates and staff in a hurry often go for baguettes and sandwiches.

Avenance came up with a good way of encouraging jurors to spend their subsistence allowance of £4.25 per day or £2.10 per half-day on court premises rather than nipping out to the high street. It developed a smartcard system with Sharp, whereby the subsistence allowance is allocated to each juror on a card that is swiped through the court tills.

Avenance first tried out its system in Leicester and Oxford and found that sales increased significantly, so it rolled out the system throughout the contract. It was quickly adopted by the other caterers, and Sutcliffe has seen business with jurors rise by 30% as a result - in some areas the increase has been as high as 50%.

Each caterer talks politely about the companies operating the other three contracts, and management from all four are brought together occasionally by Cooney and Pyne to swap notes on good practice.

Arthur Meakin of Sutcliffe concedes: "Benchmarking is a major benefit for the client. It's tactically interesting for us to know how someone is performing in an area. If one contractor does something well, soon everyone can apply it."

The use of brand names was established in this way, says Meakin. The four brand names adopted by the caterers - Willows, Chambers Café, Rumpole's and Oakes - have all been chosen to reflect the sober atmosphere of the courts.

Gwynfa Llewellyn, managing director of Link, says: "The discipline of a service level agreement is a good tool - it defines everything we offer to the customer: menus, times, tariffs, level of service. This agreement is effectively an operations manual."

But the caterers never forget they are rivals, especially with contracts coming up for renewal in 2001. The real winner here is the Court Service. Four contractors serving the same client to the same specification: how could you design a better way of monitoring standards of service delivery?