Attempts by Lancashire County Council to make essential savings have stalled. Just three months after moving into a newly refurbished building, costing £250,000, the offices have been abandoned.
More than 400 Lancashire County Council employees were moved to the building in an attempt to cut costs and bring smaller, fragmented teams under one roof. But when BT showed interest in setting up a call centre in the county, the council was more than happy to hand over its freshly revamped building. But as one of the office workers has described, much of the furniture is now either being sent into storage, donated to charities or thrown into skips.
For Lancashire County Council to spend a quarter of a million pounds kitting out their new office block, only to hand it over to BT three months looks like poor judgement and is a huge waste of taxpayers’ money. It is hard to believe that there weren’t any other vacant offices in Lancashire that BT could have taken instead. Lancashire County Council wasted a fortune in what should’ve been a straightforward money-saving move. In future the council must more careful with taxpayers’ money to avoid repeating the same costly mistake.