Why we need a £30 million HQ

QUENTIN Macdonald pushes through the door to 2 St Leonard's Place, York. "Welcome to the rabbit warren," he says.

He's not kidding; 2 St Leonard's is home to, among other things, the city council's revenue and benefits department - or "revs and bens", as the department's head Julie McMurray calls it. And it is, literally, a warren.

Julie leads us down a steep, claustrophobic stairway - no lifts here, this is a listed building - into the basement. In one small, dim room, members of her team work at desks below windows which look out on to... a stone wall. Crane your head and you can just about make out the metal railings which mark street level high above.

Julie takes us on a tour of the rest of her little empire. We pass along dark, narrow corridors and up and down innumerable flights of steep stairs. At one point, porters are struggling to manoeuvre a trolley full of files down a steep ramp and round a sharp bend. Their way is almost blocked by a photocopier stuck in the corridor - the only place that could be found for it.

Elsewhere, a cheerful member of staff is sitting at a desk which completely blocks an open doorway. It used to be a corridor, Julie explains: but they had no choice but to put a desk there so as to squeeze everybody in.

It gets very hot down here in the basement in summer. There's no central heating - listed building, remember - and if staff open the windows to let in fresh air, they have to put up with noise and fumes from the street above instead. In winter, by contrast, it costs a fortune to heat.

The council's St Leonard's Place headquarters stretches over nine substantial Georgian buildings. They are all listed, says Coun Macdonald, all haphazardly knocked through to create one big office block, all utterly unsuited to be the HQ of a busy modern council.

It gets worse. St Leonard's Place is one of 16 separate buildings scattered across the city which are home to different council departments. Coun Macdonald - the council's executive member for resources - says people who come in to use the council services get fed up of being sent here, there and everywhere.

Having an operation scattered in various out-of-date and unsuitable buildings across the city simply isn't the way to run a local authority, he insists. Hence the announcement a week ago that the council wants to build a £30 million new HQ at Hungate, to house nearly 1,600 staff.

"Not another council wasting £30 million of taxpayers' money on a plush new HQ?", I hear you grumble. "It's just a vanity project. Don't they have better things to spend their money on?"

It's not vanity at all, insists Coun Macdonald. It's absolutely necessary if the council is to modernise and offer a better service to the people of York. And it won't cost the ratepayers of York a penny.

Come again? How's that?

To give the council its due, the economics of the move do seem to stack up. The total cost of the new building is expected to be no more than £30 million. The council hopes to raise more than £10 million of that by selling off various city centre offices it owns, including St Leonard's Place and Museum Street. The balance will be paid for by taking out Government loans - which are the cheapest loans it is possible to get, Coun Macdonald points out.

Not one penny of council taxpayers' money will be spent to pay back those loans. Instead, the £860,000-odd that the council spends every year on leasing premises it doesn't own - such as in Back Swinegate and George Hudson Street - will be diverted to paying off the loans on the new building.

So the whole project will pay for itself. "Effectively, instead of renting we are going to be taking out a mortgage," says Coun Macdonald.

The council will actually be better off as a result of the move. Buildings such as St Leonard's Place and Museum Street are so old and so inefficient that, once the council has moved into its purpose-built HQ, officials estimate they will save £29 million over the next 30 years on heating, lighting, maintenance and other building running costs.

That is almost £1 million a year in savings - money that will be available to plough back directly into front-line council services, says assistant director for property services Neil Hindhaugh.

This rosy picture, of course, assumes that the cost of the new building does not spiral out of control, as is so often the case with public projects like this.

The council, says Mr Hindhaugh, is "very confident" that won't happen. A sum of money has been built into the cost to cater for things like possible delays caused by archaeological discoveries on the Hungate site, he says.

There is little accounting for things like the cost of steel or building materials - but to try to ensure that costs do not spiral, the developers will be brought on board at a very early stage.

A maximum price will be set with them and then, before any construction work begins, a guaranteed price.

There can never be absolute guarantees on such a thing, he admits, but the council hopes it will get as close to them as it is possible to do.

Time will tell.

City of York Council's planned move to a new HQ raises a number of other issues. Here are a few of them:

The timescale

The city council publicly announced its plans for the new HQ last Friday. Members of the ruling executive committee are expected to approve them next Tuesday.

That doesn't leave much time for public discussion. But it has been public knowledge for the past couple of years or so that the council is reviewing its office needs, says Coun Macdonald. He believes members of the public back the move. He has had a number of comments since the announcement, including one from a man who said: "Jolly good. It's about bloody time, too!"

The precise location of the new HQ is not something that members of the public would be consulted on anyway, says Mr Hindhaugh. "They are not in a position to make that judgement." But he can't see any reason why anyone would object to the Hungate site, which is, after all, in the city centre. "We could have gone out to Monks Cross, but how many of the people of York would have wanted to get on a bus to come and see us?"

If all goes well, construction should begin in February 2008, with the new HQ being completed by December 2009.

The site

The new HQ will form part of the Hungate redevelopment. That always included an element of office space: the council HQ will be it.

The offices will be slightly larger than envisaged in the already-approved outline plan for Hungate, hence the need to bulldoze the Peasholme Centre for homeless people - which is owned by the council - and extend the office building on to that land. The change, however, is "not significant" in planning terms and should not mean the entire Hungate scheme being referred back to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott for a possible call-in, says Mr Hindhaugh.

Three or four alternative sites for the Peasholme homeless hostel have already been looked at, although the council will not at this stage reveal where they are. There will be full public consultation before a decision is made on where to relocate the hostel, Mr Hindhaugh says.

Council jobs

Council staff will be able to work much more efficiently - they won't need to keep going from building to building to meet each other, and messengers won't have to travel miles along narrow corridors to deliver mail and files.

So there will, in the words of Mr Hindhaugh, be a "better use of the people resource."

The aim of the move, however, is not to enable the council to cut its staff numbers, insists Coun Macdonald.

If some council posts do become redundant, therefore, staff might be redeployed to other jobs. "If people don't need to do this, maybe they could do that," he says. "There are lots of things we would like to do if we had the dosh."

Move benefits

A report to the members of City of York Council's ruling executive committee lists numerous benefits of the move to a modern, purpose-built HQ on one site.

They include:

modern offices in which staff can work more effectively and efficiently. The new building will also make it easier to recruit high calibre staff - "you can't expect a young person just out of school to have an ambition to work in the basement of St Leonard's Place," points out Coun Macdonald - and, because it will be better in terms of health and safety, it should also reduce sickness absence.

Almost all council services will be based in one place (although the council will keep the Guildhall, St Anthony's House and its base in York Road, Acomb), making them much more accessible

Partner organisations such as the police and tourist information could also have a presence in the new HQ - making for more joined-up partnership working

The new building will be disabled friendly, and green friendly

St Leonard's Place could be transformed, with the Georgian houses used for hotels, restaurants, shops and flats so that the street becomes a vibrant part of York's "arts quarter"

Work on building the new HQ and on transforming St Leonard's Place and other council properties being sold off would create jobs and generate inward investment into the city of about £50 million.

Updated: 10:16 Friday, November 18, 2005