Agenda item

The committee was asked to consider this item as urgent business as the report had been published after the main agenda and hence had not been in the public domain for the statutory length of time. This was agreed.

1.            The Chairman asked Members if, in debating the subject, they wished to refer to the information included in the exempt appendix to the report.  They confirmed that they did not and so the item was considered entirely in an open session. 

2.            Mr Oakford introduced the report, which updated Members on the further work which had been undertaken since last reporting to the Cabinet Committee in November 2020, the revised accommodation model, the ability of the Strategic Headquarters accommodation to meet the Council’s needs and the preferred option. He highlighted the process by which the available options had been assessed and scored and highlighted the keys aims of the programme: to achieve space for staff to return to working in an office for 2-3 days a week, and the need for space for officers and Members to meet and collaborate. He referred to the backlog of maintenance work which needed to be completed to make Sessions House fit for purpose and he and Ms Spore advised Members of the stages of the RIBA Plan of Works process by which capital projects were planned, costed and monitored. A copy of a document setting out this process was shared with the committee after the meeting. Mr Oakford advised that the key decisions on the way forward would be made by the Cabinet, with the first one being expected early in 2022.

3.            Members’ comments on the report and the proposals included the following:-

·         information about the future plans needed to be relayed clearly to the public, and they should be asked what they wanted to see in the county town as the County Council’s civic centre;

·         the retention of a strategic headquarters in Maidstone was supported, and Mr Oakford and the officer team were thanked for their work in bringing forward the current proposals;

·         changes in working practice and reduced demand for office space needed to be taken into account in future plans, however, not all staff were able to or wished to work from home in the long term; 

·         plans would need to identify what accommodation would be needed post-pandemic, for staff and members. Working patterns could be reviewed in 6 months’ or 18 months’ time to check how needs had changed;

·         presenting the majority of the information about the proposals in an open rather than an exempt report was welcomed;

·         the report did not make clear how block E of Sessions House was to be used;

·         that the heritage of Sessions House was being recognised, and that it was to be used as a civic centre, were welcomed;

·         senior officers and Members being accommodated in the same building would support good communications and working relationships; 

·         the Council should not reduce the space available for its own needs until it was clear what those needs were; 

·         the proposals would take time to come to fruition; the new accommodation strategy could take more than three years to implement;

·         continued virtual working was not good for staff wellbeing, and staff were harder to keep motivated when working remotely;

·         the Council could learn from private sector practice as it moved ahead to scope the options;

·         staff needed to have a choice of where they worked, so it was important to be able to offer flexibility of accommodation and working practice;

·         issues relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the security of the wide range of sensitive and confidential information handled by Council staff would need to be protected in whatever new range of working arrangements was ultimately adopted;

·         the Council could have started to address the maintenance issues at Sessions House during the previous 18 months, while staff had been working at home and the building had been empty; and

·         such an important issue should be presented higher on the agenda in future, or else be the subject of a special meeting.

4.            Mr Oakford, Ms Spore, Mr Watts and Ms Beer responded to questions from the committee, including the following:-

a)    asked if sufficient parts of the strategic headquarters (SHQ) could be made fit for purpose to support staff needing to work there, for example, storage units to support hot desking, Mr Oakford advised that the County Council had many regional offices and that staff would not necessarily be expected to travel to Maidstone to access office accommodation.  Successive staff surveys, undertaken throughout the pandemic, had asked staff to say how they felt about working remotely and returning to an office after the pandemic; 

b)    Ms Spore advised that alternative uses for parts of Sessions House had been explored as part of the proposals, to share the building with stakeholders, including Maidstone Borough Council, Her Majesty's Prison Service, heritage organisations and the local business sector;

c)    Mr Watts assured Members that all available information had been made available to the committee for it to comment on, and that the Council had complied with all its legal duties in preparing the proposals;

d)    In response to concern expressed that no sites outside Maidstone were referred to in the report, Mr Oakford advised that many locations had been reviewed, in terms of office costs and accessibility, and that the focus had settled on retaining Maidstone as the Council’s headquarters; and  

e)    Ms Beer acknowledged the range of comments made by Members about the importance of offering flexibility in working arrangements, listening to staff’s wishes and needs, and added the need to support staff in being able to uphold standards of service delivery.

5.            Mr N J D Chard noted that the wording of recommendation c) did not agree with the wording of recommendation a) iii). He proposed and the Chairman, Mr R Thomas, seconded that a change be made to the wording of recommendation c) as follows: ‘agree that the Director of Infrastructure shall work with key stakeholders to test the feasibility of future alternative uses for blocks A, B and E of Sessions House with detailed proposals (financially and legally assessed) to be included as part of the proposals at b) above.’ Mr Watts advised that the impact of this change would mean that a separate decision would be required on the future use of blocks C and D.

6.         The committee then considered the recommendations set out in the report, with the text of recommendation c) amended by Mr Chard’s motion, set out above. This was agreed, with abstentions from Mr A Brady, Mr A Hook, Mr P Stepto and Dr L Sullivan.

7.        It was RESOLVED that the decision proposed to be taken by the Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, Corporate and Traded Services, to:-

a) agree that the political priorities in any preferred option for the future of Sessions House include:

i)  the retention of the County Council’s strategic headquarters in Maidstone,

ii) the modernisation and expansion of Invicta House as the main staff accommodation hub for Maidstone, with office hubs located in other districts, sized accordingly; and

iii) the provision of civic accommodation in Sessions House blocks C and D (Central Core);

b) agree to allocate £2,082,000 from the capital feasibility Medium-Term Financial Plan (MTFP) allocation to enable further testing and development of a detailed financial and legal assessment and feasibility work to RIBA stage 3 for the preferred option before final detailed proposals are provided to Cabinet for a final decision to be taken; and

c) agree that the Director of Infrastructure shall work with key stakeholders to test the feasibility of future alternative uses for blocks A, B and Eof Sessions House, with detailed proposals (financially and legally assessed) to be included as part of the proposals at b) above.