£10m Wolverhampton fire control HQ we did not even need
A £10 million fire control headquarters that was abandoned before it was even finished may not have been necessary in the first place, a senior civil servant has said.
Sir Bob Kerslake made the damning admission during a Parliamentary committee as MPs looked into government efforts to dispose of nine centres which are still costing taxpayers millions of pounds a year.
And he said the government was having difficulty attracting another tenant to rent the site in Wolverhampton because of another new office next door.
Sir Bob, the permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, said he questioned whether there was ever any need for all the country's fire control centres to be linked up to the same computer system.
The fire control centre built at Wolverhampton Business Park is now being offered to rent at £450,000 a year.
Sir Bob said: "The fire control centre in Wolverhampton is on a business park. The next door building is a flexible office space completed in 2007. It's still empty. These are high cost, high spec, bespoke buildings. They are going to take some shifting. We will bust a gut to do so."
But taxpayers are still funding £5,000 a day in rent, security, electricity and utility bills for the 30,000 sq ft building.
The aim of the FireControl scheme was to bring the control rooms of the West Midlands, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Hereford and Worcester fire services under one roof in Wolverhampton.
Nationally nine new centre would replace 46 to provide a countrywide service and back up in the event of a terrorist attack. The project was dreamed up under former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott in 2004 as part of his plans for regional government.
But the centres were scrapped in 2010 after costs for completing the new bases soared from £120m to £635m, meaning the move could no longer go ahead.
Sir Bob said: "It's a good question whether we ever needed what was being proposed by FireControl.
"It was built on a model of regional centres that was not appropriate to the needs of the country.
"It was, in my view, significantly over specified for what was required by way of resilience. You didn't require a system where you could in any part of the country provide the backup to another part of the country in that way. You did need automatic backup from one authority to another in a collaborative way."
But he said had the problems with computer systems not happened the project would have gone ahead.