North of town plan for Jersey “Whitehall” for civil servants

Wednesday 10 February 2016

Hundreds of civil servants could be moving to the Social Security building in La Motte Street to reduce the number of buildings occupied by States departments and save on running costs.

A decision will be made next month on whether to extend either the Social Security offices in La Motte Street or the Cyril le Marquand House building in Union Street.

The plan is to try to create more space in one main building so that the States can vacate some of the 23 sites that they currently operate from, as well as working in a more modern and flexible building, and create efficiencies by putting all administrative staff in one site.

Treasury Minister Alan Maclean recently signed off a £350,000 budget for feasibility studies on the project and has backed the idea as a potential game-changer for productivity within the public sector, and Chief Minister Ian Gorst now says that the la Motte Street building was the most likely choice.

He said: “ We are looking for a decision in March, and it’s either going to be at Cyril Le Marquand House or the current Social Security site.

“It looks as though the current Social Security site is probably going to be the front-runner because of the floor plates and the ease of building in other bits where the current building is empty, and it’s potentially the quickest as well.

“We are still working on the assumption that by the end of 2018 we could be in a new building.”

States Chief Executive John Richardson has been championing the project – in September he said that the potential benefits of putting together administrative staff from different sites could be “huge”.

At the time, he told the Public Accounts Committee: “If we left the functional departments like Health, Education obviously, in hospitals and schools, we could accommodate all of the staff in those two buildings.

“So all of the smaller buildings, smaller office blocks, we could then lose completely. Taking a more streamlined approach and allowing for further headcount reduction and staff reductions and bringing services together, it is very early days yet but we think it might be possible to get all the administration into one of those two buildings.

“The benefits we get through that will be enormous to us, because we then get effectively all the administrative staff in one building.”