Abandoned £10m Wolverhampton fire HQ is finally put to use

Now, however, this smart building on prime development land in Wolverhampton has a new lease of life as a technology centre, after it was taken on by a growing company.

Information technology and internet service provider Oosha has around 25 staff but plans to double its workforce over the next few years to meet rising demand for its services.

And the company is hiring out its various new offices as conference spaces after moving in at the beginning of January.

Already up to 100 people a day, including schools and businesses, are using it for lectures and training.

It is a swift and dramatic change for the two-storey building which was meant to have become one of nine regional fire service centres to replace the national network of 46 control rooms.

The plan, set up by former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott, was eventually scrapped in 2010 following years of embarrassing delays and spiralling costs.

The abandoned project meant a waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money and the West Midlands centre alone, at Wolverhampton Business Park, was costing the public purse £1.8m a year in rent and security, despite having never handled a single emergency call.

It was supposed to merge the West Midlands, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Hereford and Worcester fire service control rooms.

Oosha's move will mean that at least some of that rent will be covered although the company has not revealed how much it is paying to lease the 30,000 sq ft building.

But its decision to re-locate from the Chubb Buildings in Wolverhampton city centre into the fire control site, which it has re-named Midlands Technology Centre, ends its depressing legacy as one of the country's biggest white elephants.

And it also reduces the weight of an expensive millstone around the neck of the taxpaying public.

Oosha operations director Matthew Newton said: "We're hoping this will be a new chapter for the building. It was perfect for us because of its security, which is important for us in terms of our IT work. It also gives us the space to store more data.

"And we're using the building for conference facilities. Bookings within the education sector have been going really well, just thanks to word of mouth so far." Instead of a big control room dispatching fire engines across the West Midlands, the building has been kitted out with interactive whiteboards, projectors and plasma screens.

Some of the rooms have also been affectionately named after classic computers and consoles by the IT experts. They include the Sinclair, Commodore, Spectrum, Atari and Amiga suites.

The abandoned Fire Control project was initiated in 2004 and was originally supposed to cost £120m. But problems with the IT system and its installation, coupled with what the National Audit Office called 'an over-reliance on poorly managed consultants', meant costs had spiralled to several times that before it was finally scrapped in 2010.

Completing it would have taken the total bill to £635m. By the time the plug was pulled, the Wolverhampton building had been standing for three years and was costing £5,000 a day to do nothing. It was hardly ever occupied, other than for meetings and by round-the-clock security staff.

Lord Prescott told the Express & Star last year that he was not to blame for the fiasco and said it was the fault of a 'bloody civil servant'. He said that when he left office as deputy prime minister in 2007 he was told the project was still on budget.

Lord Prescott said at the time: "When I left office that was a programme that was going to cost £100m. They confirmed it was on budget. Twelve months after I left it went up to this enormous figure.

"The bloody civil servant in charge of it who is now in Scotland, they didn't call him before the committee because he's no longer in charge of it. Why did it go to that amount?"

He added: "The regional concept was right. It was recommended to me after a strike. We had a bit of a ding dong." The Government signed a 25-year lease which required it to increase its rental payments by 2.5 per cent every five years, even though no-one was working there.