Tameside Council 'faces £9m Carillion HQ bill'

The project will see a new joint public service centre built for the council

The collapse of Carillion halfway through a project to build a council HQ and college buildings will cost a Greater Manchester council £9m.

Tameside Council will have to use its capital budget so the £36m second phase of the development can go ahead.

The final bill will be £9.4m and will force a re-prioritisation of "plans for future investment and regeneration", cabinet members were told on Wednesday.

It will not become "a white elephant", council leader Brenda Warrington said.

The project will see a new Advanced Skills Centre for Tameside College, a Joint Public Service Centre headquarters and a new Wilko's shop built in Ashton-Under-Lyne's town centre.

Robertson Construction Group have replaced Carillion as contractor for the project

Building work stopped when the UK's second largest construction firm Carillion, which was acting as the main contractor, went into liquidation in January.

The council brought in a new contractor, Robertson Construction Group, and got sub-contractors back on site.

Ms Warrington said it was was "soul destroying" when Carillion collapsed 105 days away from completion of the building work but "swift action" saved the project from becoming "stagnant", said the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

She said "considerable amounts of capital" had been spent so it "would have been a massive disservice to the people of Tameside".

"So the choice was - have a white elephant sat there doing nothing, it's cost us a lot of money and we get nothing back from it - or to make the difficult decisions to test out how do we get this completed?"

Carillion owed about £2bn to its 30,000 suppliers, sub-contractors and short-term creditors, all of which risk getting nothing back from the liquidation.