The rise of hybrid working means Greenwich Council could hire out two floors of its HQ to other organisations – just 13 years after the showpiece building opened.
The Woolwich Centre, which has room for 3,000 staff, opened in 2011 as the first part of the still-unfinished development that includes the next-door Tesco store and hundreds of flats.
But fewer staff are now working there five days a week, and the council is thinking of leasing out the spare space.
“Optimising” the space, which would begin with moving staff based at Thistlebrook in Abbey Wood and Queen Elizabeth Hospital to the Woolwich Centre, could save £700,000 a year, according to council budget documents.
“Pretty much, it is the post-Covid home working transfer that has made this possible,” Aidan Smith, the cabinet member for regeneration, told the council’s overview and scrutiny panel recently, when it went through the council’s plans to save £33 million from its budget.
After being pressed by Matt Hartley, the Conservative opposition leader, on whether the council could move more quickly and free up more space, he responded: “Is two floors the maximum? I would say two floors is what we’re willing to start with and then we’ll see where we are in the future.
“I don’t know whether you’ve ever worked at an office that has moved to a hybrid model. I certainly have and you have to go through lots of consultations. You have to plan the right amount of storage. Then you normally have to get people in to reconfigure the space. So it is not something that you can do overnight.
“I think we’re wanting to commit realistically to what we think we’d be able to achieve.”
Hartley asked whether space would be let out to small businesses – a question prompted by The Greenwich Wire’s new Sunday Extra subscriber-only email, which recently discussed the lack of co-working spaces in the borough. Lewisham Council has leased out part of its HQ in Catford to creative businesses.
“Offering shared flexible working to small business owners is quite rare actually in southeast London. There’s not too many opportunities,” he said, adding that Woolwich Works had recently started offering low-cost spaces for flexible working in its café.
“We want to encourage Woolwich Works to succeed. But is that potentially one use and could that be a way of moving beyond two floors?”
Smith said the council’s priority would be to move people in from other sites so they could be leased out or sold, but Pippa Hack, the council’s director of regeneration, said the idea was being considered.
“We’ll be doing some soft market testing to test the interest on the space available and we are bound by best-consideration rules,” she said. “It will depend on what the market response is.”
Smith added that the council was looking at ways to increase affordable workspace in Woolwich town centre and added: “There are some developments coming forward for planning, which might also increase that and increase shared space.”
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