Part of Highland Council’s Inverness headquarters to be demolished after asbestos found
Highland Council is set to demolish part of its Inverness HQ because asbestos has been uncovered with all staff to vacate the condemned block by December with a tender to take it down launched early next year.
The significant move has been revealed to the council's redesign board – a body that seeks to reform and improve local authority operations – as part of a major rationalisation of local authority properties across the region.
That rationalisation is intended to help put the local authority on the right path as tens of millions of pounds must be cut from its budget in the next few years and some buildings are underused and costly.
The council is targeting around £700,000 of savings between now and 2027 from its facilities – no easy task given that £790,000 in unachieved savings were carried forward from previous years.
It also feeds into the ambitious £2 billion capital investment programme which was recently announced to deliver new schools, more road repairs but also reviewing which properties the council could share with partners like the NHS or the police.
Earlier, councillors agreed that the sandstone headquarters building in Inverness but Block A to the rear of the HQ will be vacated by December with around 90 “individual sub-team moves” moving to other facilities.
The work to tear down the buildings is expected to be tendered by the end of 2024 and advance work is set to commence in early 2025.
And Dingwall could be one of the main beneficiaries of the rationalisation process as calls emerge to make greater use of the former seat of the district council in Ross-shire’s market town.
Since the creation of Highland Council in the 1990s the building has remained in partial use for officials and meetings of the local area committee but now it could get a new lease of life.
The proposal remains at an early stage but it would mean an incremental move towards decentralisation of staff from Inverness as well as the not insignificant benefits to the Ross-shire town’s High Street footfall.
The council’s Finlay MacDonald and Robert Campbell stated: “Members have previously agreed that the Ardross Street sandstone building at Headquarters in Inverness should be retained for use as office accommodation to allow the demolition of other blocks that are in poorer condition and that would require significant capital and maintenance investment in the coming years.
“Internal moves within the headquarters building are now underway. A detailed programme of all necessary activities is currently being rolled out.
“A Strategic Action Plan for the Inverness area is underway with the aim to identify potential savings in future years, establish the actions required to deliver on corporate targets, identify the related resources required to deliver these improvements, and identify priorities to feed into service team workplans.”
