As an employee in the building and a tax payer at first I was skeptical of the cost savings Staffordshire Place 1 & 2 would have
I agree that the outside of the buildings do look terrible and seem to have gotten worse as the months have passed, I'd rather not comment on the contractors themselves as I don't know how they are being managed or what roles/duties they have been assigned but the progress does seem very slow. On the inside nearly all of the teething problems that I recall are gone, though the swipe barriers to get in/out are still a massive pain!
In terms of printing, many of the old buildings did have deskjet/inkjet and old laserjet printers which used different cartridges/toners and constantly broke down due to age. The new printing solution is made up of MFD's scattered around each floor in each building, most are the same make/model so the consumables are the same and the processes behind ordering toners/paper will have been greatly optimised. The speed of the devices is improved, more functionality (scanning for example) removing the need for several devices on each desk, the power usage /standby will bring energy savings too. As these devices are located away from desks staff do consider what they print instead of just clicking print and reaching for the printer that used to be a few feet away.
In terms of the way staff work, the new offices have been a major part in helping with efficiencies, promoting new ways of working and improving how we go about our daily duties. The meeting room facilities are superb, the kitchen and restrooms are brilliant and my workspace is a lot more pleasant so I personally feel I am a lot more productive and happy. All of the colleagues I need to liaise with are nearby so I rarely need to travel.
When you actually start to think about the cost savings from reducing the number of buildings, consider how expensive it will have been keeping all the old buildings and rented units (such as the ones on Staffs Tech Park) operational with a few hundred staff (if that) in them. Many of the buildings I worked in had terrible heating systems and were single glazed meaning you needed to wear a hat and coat to stop shivering. Not having caretakers for each site, a single staff pool of cleaners, fewer managed network connections of which many were totally unsuitable, modern heating and not having to perform constant building maintenance (although the new building has had its obvious issues) I can certainly imagine that centralising staff into two new buildings will be a huge cost saving for many years.
When calculating how long it'll take to break even on the £40m figure that is banded around, however it was funded, it's not just the yearly savings but the money generated from selling old assets, along with the figures that are often ignored like staff sickness, traveling, expenses, postage, office moves, telephone calls (now using VOIP) etc.
I'm surprised thought that as a public organisation SCC have not been more forthcoming with an actual breakdown of figures so maybe someone needs to submit a FOI request to get all the data into public view?
