Budget-cut police ready to sell buildings to reduce energy bills

The extensive shake-up of facilities is centred on the building of a new £30m divisional headquarters and 40-cell custody suite at Clough Road, Hull, which is due to open in 2013.

Alongside plans to sell the existing D Division (Hull) HQ at Queens Gardens, a report on the force’s estates strategy for the next nine years reveals plans to either vacate, sell or otherwise “dispose” of:

Tower Grange police station;

Former Withernsea police station;

Beverley police station;

Two police houses in Barton and one in Beverley;

Police boxes in North Cave, Kirton Lindsey, and Holderness Road, Hull;

Offices or other accommodation at Annie Reed Road, Beverley, Foster Street, Hull, and Derringham Street, Hull.

The new facility at Clough Road will also house a £530,000 Gold Command suite on the third floor of the four-storey building, but new homes will have to be found for a range of other services and operational assets currently held at Queens Gardens.

These include Riverside neighbourhood policing team, vehicle workshops, finance, information services branch, the marine and underwater search unit, and the armoury.

Offices for the union Unison have already been moved to Courtland Road, Hull, the force training centre, and the forensic laboratories have been relocated to Sensor House, Beverley.

The force had explored a number of possible locations for the underwater search unit on both banks of the Humber, but has gone back to the drawing board after its preferred site, King George Dock in Hull, has instead been earmarked for a new wind turbine manufacturing plant for the engineering giant Siemens.

The Riverside neighbourhood policing team could move to new accommodation it would jointly share with Humberside Fire and Rescue Service and Hull Citysafe as part of the “Blue Lights” project, but work to find a suitable site is still going on.

A major refurbishment of Bransholme police station would follow the incident response team’s move to Cough Road, but plans for the complete overhaul of the Northern Command Centre at Hessle police station have yet to be agreed.

Plans to sell Queens Gardens could prove problematic, however, as the report says there has been only “limited” interest in the building and site.

The force is making efforts to reduce its energy consumption, and the report suggests gas and electricity prices will rise over the next four years by 60 and 40 per cent respectively.

A significant contribution to energy reduction will be made by the Clough Road development, which is projected to have annual energy costs of about £90,000 – a huge cut on the £260,000 bill being paid at Queens Gardens.

The move will result in a cut the force’s carbon footprint of five per cent.

Overall, the force has a target of reducing the size of its estate by 10 per cent. It currently occupies 56,269 sq metres.

To this end, the average space per workstation, which is currently 9.4 sq metres, will be reduced to 7.5.

More than 750 officers and civilians will be based at Clough Road, which is being built on the site of a former gas works and will become a prominent new landmark.

Its energy-saving features will include photovoltaic panels, three small wind turbines in the car park and a biomass boiler.

The new headquarters will be funded through capital loans to be repaid over a period of between 30 and 50 years.

The force has to save £30m over the next four years and plans to axe 331 jobs in that time. Nearly 130 officers will go over the next year.