Berkshire fire headquarters to move to former retail site in Theale Cross

The move will include the relocation of 180 members of staff from Dee Road to a site in Pincents Lane and over the next two years.
Berkshire fire’s new headquarters in Theale will be located on a brownfield site previously used for retail and storage and the move will cost £1.3m to complete, it was announced after contracts were exchanged on Wednesday.
Assistant chief fire officer Paul Southern said he was delighted: “The headquarters and fire station buildings date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, are in a dilapidated state and no longer provide a suitable working environment. The buildings have extensive concrete ‘cancer’ with a remaining working life of just a few years.”
He said a move to a new site was the most economical option, and added that the new location held strategic advantages as well: “We want to move the fire station because our operational data and risk planning shows that it is no longer in the optimum location for responding to emergency calls.”
The move will be funded by the sale of the current sites, and by money previously set aside for this purpose – no borrowing will be needed to fund the project.
Mr Southern said he hoped the building will provide a home for the service for at least 30 years.
The news came on the same day as an announcement that £3.6m had been secured from central government for a joint control room, where emergency calls are answered, serving Berkshire and Oxfordshire’s fire and rescue services.
The funding was announced by Fire Minister Bob Neill as part of a grant made to help fill the gap left by the cancelation of the FiReControl project – a brainchild of the previous Labour Government.
Under the FiReControl project the country would have been served by nine regional control rooms, and in anticipation of these plans, funding to local control rooms were limited.
The Berkshire and Oxfordshire services made a bid for a joint control room in November.
Berkshire’s chief fire officer, Iain Cox, said: “There is still a huge amount of work to be done but, now that we know we have the funding in place, we can continue with our plans, which we expect to be in operation by spring 2014.
“Individual Control rooms are becoming increasingly unviable due to falling incident numbers and the consequential increase in cost per call handled,” he said.