Plans to move hundreds of parliamentary staff to Westminster City Hall have been put on hold as a result of pandemic-induced home-working arrangements, with much of the office space now set to be sublet instead.
Parliament signed a deal last year to lease the lower 10 floors of Westminster City Hall, Victoria Street, SW1, which were earmarked for up to 1,000 workers during a planned £4bn restoration of the Palace of Westminster.
However, the move had still not gone ahead when the country went into lockdown in March, prompting an overnight shift to working from home. Now, the parliamentary estate hopes to sublet about half of the nearly 100,000 sq ft space, with many workers set to continue working remotely for the foreseeable future. Cluttons will advertise the top five floors parliament planned to take in the coming weeks. Parliamentary staff will still work from the lower five floors.
A House of Commons spokesman said: “To enable urgent construction work to begin on the Commons Estate, the House of Commons took a lease of 10 floors of a building at 64 Victoria Street in 2019 in order to decant parliamentary staff from other buildings.
“Given the changes to our ways of working brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, we are currently reviewing whether all of this additional office capacity is required, and exploring the option of subletting a flexible number of floors at 64 Victoria Street so as to reduce our property costs and ensure value for money to the taxpayer.”
They added: “This is a prudent move to ensure we are creating new workplaces that reflect how our staff want to work in future and any subletting will be subject to formal approval as required.”
Administrative staff for the Houses of Commons and Lords were set to move into the space, along with newly appointed consultants working on the restoration project. They would have replaced workers from Westminster City council, which is also based at the building. The council, meanwhile, was set to consolidate its staff into the upper 10 floors of the block, which was recently given a £77m revamp.
The move comes after a dramatic increase in second-hand space for sublet has flooded the central London market over the course of 2020. According to figures supplied by JLL, more than 12m sq ft of space for sublet became available in the third quarter, compared to just 8.3m sq ft in the first three months of the year.
