Council faces significant disruption after fire

Significant disruption is expected at Nottinghamshire County Council following a fire at its headquarters that spread across four floors.

Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service sent 12 crews to deal with the blaze at County Hall on Thursday.

A notice issued to staff urged them not to work from the building on Friday.

IT systems were understood to be down on Thursday evening and further disruption is expected.

Twelve fire engines were sent to the blaze

In the staff notice, seen by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the council said: "Due to the fire emergency at County Hall, we will be experiencing a loss of power.

"There will be a loss of some services including Skype, Rostrvm, Capita One and GIS.

"We are working with our suppliers and partners to ensure normal services can be resumed as soon as possible.

"The authority has also said its customer services have been impacted by the incident, with phone lines remaining down on Friday morning."

Speaking after the fire, council leader Ben Bradley said there was expected to be disruption to the way his councillors conduct their business after the blaze started in their corridor.

Smoke could be seen from the other side of the River Trent

He said: "It doesn't look good at all for that portion of the building, certainly, it looks like we're not going to get back into our corridor where we work as a political administration for quite some time.

"It's our offices as councillors that seemingly have felt the brunt of it, so we're waiting to find out what's happened and why and to what extent that damage is - whether it's spread along the corridor.

"We're going to have to look for some alternative accommodation, I think it's very unlikely we're going to be allowed back into that part of the building any time soon.

"We'll figure that out over the coming days to make sure we've got that continuity for our part of the job as well."

The fire was extinguished by 18:00 BST and the fire service said no-one was injured in the blaze.