A £23m Cambridgeshire control centre remains empty, eight years after the building was completed.
A £23m control centre in Cambridgeshire remains empty eight years after it was completed, a situation that has been described as ‘perverse’ by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).
Riccardo La Torre, FBU Eastern regional secretary, said: ‘The money spent on this building could have been invested much more productively in the fire service at a time when we’re seeing record cuts to the fire service in the east of England’.
‘Sixteen million pounds would fund approximately 16 whole-time, 24 hour-a-day fire stations for the best of a year.’
According to the FBU the building costs £2m a year to maintain.
Plans were made by the Labour government to replace existing community control centres with regional centres.
The Waterbeach headquarters would have answered all the emergency fire calls from Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertfordshire and north Essex.
The project was abandoned in 2010 following the decision by the coalition government that the ‘requirements of the project cannot be delivered in an acceptable timeframe’.
The Department for Communities and Local Government, which is responsible for the centres, including the centre at Waterbeach, said it ‘had revised the contract for the ongoing maintenance of the remaining control centres and the maintenance of specialist equipment has been reduced to the minimum legislative requirements for an unoccupied space’.
‘Due to the terms agreed by the previous administration from 2007, we’re unable to sell the regional fire centres until their leases expire.’
‘Taxpayers continue to pay for the costs of maintaining these empty buildings’.
The unused 30,488 sq ft Waterbeach building has been for lease since 2010.
