Furniture at a scrapped £10 million fire control centre in the Black Country will be sold or divided up between fire services as the Government tries to minimise its losses.

One of the fire services covering the West Midlands could end up taking charge of a £6,000 espresso coffee machine that was installed at the new fire control centre in Wolverhampton two years ago.

The building at Wolverhampton Business Park, off Stafford Road, has cost £9.7m so far to build and has been costing £1.7m a year in rent and security.

It would have cost £23m in total to get it finished and get 130 staff in to handle 100,000 calls a year. It could now be sold off with fixtures and fittings but its owner, the Government’s

Department for Communities and Local Government, has indicated it wants it to remain in use as some kind of fire control centre.

West Midlands Fire Service is unlikely to want the building because it opened its new £20m headquarters in Nechells in January 2009.

The furniture may also be split up and given to the five fire services — West Midlands, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Hereford and Worcester and Warwickshire — as part of the plan to dispose of the building.

The building opened in 2007 but has remained empty because bosses have been unable to iron out problems of merging the control rooms of five different fire services.

Problems included being unable to develop a shared radio scheme that would work in rural areas as well as difficulty merging all the different working practices of each fire service into one system.

The £423m scheme to replace 46 fire control rooms with nine regional centres was dreamed up under the former Labour Government. But following criticism from MPs on all sides the coalition Government has scrapped it.

Sian Williams, spokeswoman for the Department for Communities and Local Government, said: “We are discussing the future of the buildings with representatives from all fire and rescue authorities.

“We hope to see them used for fire and rescue control services as they were purpose built for this.” The crisis today led to criticism from politicians, who branded it a big waste of money.

Labour councillor David Hinton, chairman of the West Midlands Fire Authority, said: “We were telling the Government it was a white elephant. They were spending public money on it like there was no tomorrow.”

Chris Downes, spokesman for the Fire Brigades Union in the West Midlands, said the West Midlands control room did not need the £6,000 coffee machine. “We would want any money from sales to go back into local fire services,” he added.