Four million pound fund to help Warwickshire building projects run more smoothly

A new £4 million Warwickshire County Council fund will be used to help major building projects run more smoothly.

The money, taken from the council’s capital investment fund, will be available to cover the cost of ground surveys in the hope that the final costs for schemes is more accurate.

Liz Firmstone, transformation service manager with the council, explained that the idea was part of a wider capital management project.

Speaking at this week’s meeting of the resources and fire & rescue overview and scrutiny meeting at the council’s Shire Hall headquarters in Warwick, she said: “We have an investigation design fund in place that will help, particularly for big projects where you need to know who owns the land and you need to do ecological of archeological studies in advance, understand what the costs of mitigation might be.

“You might need to do groundwork surveys or work out where utilities are. All of those surveys cost money but because, historically, we haven’t had a pot to go and do those in advance, it has been a finger in the air to work out what that will cost further down the line. Those are very often the reasons why projects come back to cabinet or council because they have been underestimated.

“So by providing funding to do that investigation work upfront, by the time the scheme gets into the capital programme we should have a much more accurate idea of what the whole scheme is going to cost.”

Cllr Peter Butlin (Con, Admirals and Cawston), the portfolio holder for finance and property, added: “Once you are out of the ground, pretty much all the unknowns are sorted out. It is what’s under the ground that determines whether we overrun on a project. The more we know before we start the project, the better.

“Hopefully this will basically make our ability to deliver projects on time and on budget even better.”