HMRC has signed a 25-year lease for its Nottingham regional hub with the tax authority planning to move employees into the building by 2021, with the building becoming the final lease that HMRC has signed out of the 13 regional centres
HMRC has announced the location for its final regional centre which will be based in Nottingham’s Unity Square development.
The modern, high quality development will be situated on Queensbridge Road in the city centre and is scheduled to open in summer 2021, accommodating around 4,000 full-time equivalent employees.
HMRC has signed an agreement to lease the entire 10-storey Unity Square development (276,632 sq. ft.) for a 25-year period. It will be located directly opposite both Nottingham’s train and tram stations and is within a ten-minute minute walk of the city centre.
The Nottingham hub forms part of HMRC’s office restructure project where thousands of HMRC staff will relocate to a small number of locations from the current 137 local offices and centres across the country. Up to 6,000 redundancies are expected due to the geographic relocations.
Moving to regional centres will save more than £300m up to 2025, with annual cost savings of around £90m from 2026, while improving customer service and modernising how HMRC work.
Jon Thompson, HMRC’s Chief Executive, said: ‘Signing the lease for the Unity Square development means we are retaining our presence in Nottingham city centre and creating a modern working environment for around 4,000 members of our staff.
‘It will be an impressive location for our colleagues, bringing teams together and promoting closer working relationships to increase our effectiveness in collecting taxes.’
Oliver Dowden, minister for implementation, said: ‘The regional hubs programme is a key element of the government estate strategy. Enabling civil servants to work in smarter, flexible spaces will allow government to attract and retain people from diverse backgrounds - while providing good-quality jobs and economic growth across the region.’
A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in September 2018 revealed that HMRC’s 13 regional centre locations were chosen using employees’ residential postcodes rather than on the basis of where they worked and that redundancies had already exceeded the 10% previously estimated.
The 13 regional centres are as follows:
- Belfast
- Birmingham
- Bristol
- Cardiff
- Croydon
- Edinburgh
- Glasgow
- Leeds
- Liverpool
- Manchester
- Newcastle
- Nottingham
- Stratford
Report by Pat Sweet, additional reporting by Amy Austin
