An urgent study of accommodation has been ordered as bosses struggle work out where to put thousands of workers involved as the Herefordshire Council-Primary Care Trust merger gets under way.
A confidential background report, seen by the Journal, reveals concern among members of the council’s watchdog strategic monitoring committee about the timing of a move to new offices and exactly where they will be sited.
Members of a committee project group have urged the appointment of a consultant to give their views “as a matter of urgency” on the likely time it will take to provide new accommodation for backroom office staff.
A timetable presented to the committee in April envisaged work starting on a new building in the summer and autumn of next year, with an 18-month build time and completion towards the end of 2010 – about two-and-a-half years from now.
Council officers have acknowledged that this timescale is “tight and extremely challenging”, but the committee heard another estimate from a member of the project group of 240 weeks, possibly reducing to four years. Members commented that the proposed consultant should see what the reality might be.
“A key issue is the expiry of the lease at Plough Lane in December 2010,” the report says.
“There is a clear view that it is desirable to avoid the expense and inconvenience of interim moves.
“The group has been informed that no officer is working full time on the accommodation project.”
Five Hereford sites are being considered for a new back office building.
They are the Merton Meadow car park, Blackfriars Education Centre and land around it, and offices on the Rotherwas Industrial Estate, in Plough Lane, and at Bath Street to include adjoining council sites.
The group noted there were few sites physically large enough to accommodate a back office development, and that car park and Rotherwas sites are at risk of flooding,
The Environment Agency is now very cautious about its definition of the flood plain.
Among its recommendations it warns that the project is extremely unlikely to deliver on time or estimate without a full time project team; that the process is “generally sound but short on detail”, and that the council needs to take a clear decision on the future of the Town Hall and the Shire Hall.
A group plea that there was a need to establish where West Mercia Police may relocate brought the response from the council’s director of resources that they had advised a preferred location for their headquarters at Station Approach to the north of the (Edgar Street Grid) new link road”.
“There is potential for the Fire Authority to co-locate with them”, said the director.
