Lamb & Partners Ltd

Kent County Council - Estate rationalisation. KCC have been challenged to reduce their operational costs by hundreds of millions of pounds over next few years. In order to do this they have instigated a programme of ‘Doing things differently’ to change the way they operate and use their property. The ‘New Ways of Working’ estate rationalisation is part of this programme and Mouchel have been commissioned to Programme Manage the NWoW programme across the Kent Estate. Contracted to Mouchel, Lamb & Partners are providing pre-construction project management services to the team delivering the estate rationalisation programme and have been specifically tasked with procuring the project to refurbish and re-stack Invicta House, a 1960’s 6-storey hexagonal building adjacent to County Hall in the centre of Maidstone. Knowing that most of the plant in the building is original and therefore long past its operational life expectancy, surveys and studies were commissioned to establish the exact condition of the building’s plant and its operational limitations, before the M&E design was developed. The building currently houses circa 550 people and this is set to be doubled by installing a new desk layout that encompasses new ways of working at its heart whilst refurbishing the space, mending and replacing broken parts and replacing and overhauling items of life expired plant, to provide a light and airy new working environment that enthuses the workforce, maximises the use of the property and reduces running costs per head. Having spent 10 months investigating, scoping, designing, programming, procuring, value engineering and tweaking the product, a contract was finally signed with London fit out specialist Overbury on the 20th June. Mobilisation has commenced and the work to the 1st floor will start on the 7th July and is programmed to complete at a rate of 9 weeks per floor, whilst the building remains occupied and operational with a 24/7 call centre located in the basement.

Metropolitan Police - Hendon Programme Estate Rationalisation Lamb & Partners was contracted to Mouchel to assist the Met Police in rationalising their Colindale Estate (Hendon Police Training College), in line with the master plan for the site and in order to generate funding for a new police training college and driving school on a greatly reduced site. The project entailed the consolidation of staff, ‘students’ and operational teams from across the site into newer buildings at one end of the campus, so that the old Peel House teaching block and accommodation towers could be decommissioned ahead of demolition and sale of the land for urban regeneration. The decommissioning alone saves a huge amount of revenue costs but proved very difficult to move some of the investigation teams out of the rooms that they had commandeered over the years for evidential security reasons. As part of the rationalisation and in preparation for the influx of people to the retained end of the campus, a canteen refresh and up-grade was undertaken to cope with the closing of a duplicate facilities at the other end of the campus. Further enabling works were undertaken to prepare buildings for increased populations and specialist teams requiring specific training layouts. Mouchel are engaged under a term contract to provide construction consultancy services to the Metropolitan Police Service and as such we managed Mouchel’s delivery of those services, namely building design, space planning and quantity surveying, whilst performing project and programme management services.

Queenswood School, Hertfordshire - CDM Co-ordinator The original boilers for the main boarding house at Queenswood School were reaching the end of their life and starting to cost more to maintain than was cost effective. The Estates Bursar commissioned a project to renew the boarding house boilers with a new energy efficient design and whilst doing so, relocate the plant room housing them under the building to available space in the loft. Lamb & Partners were engaged as CDM Coordinator to this project and became involved during the design phase and through to completion. The works were carried out during the summer holidays but the school and boarding house remained occupied by summer schools; therefore additional considerations had to be made for pupils in the building and outside, especially when removing redundant water tanks from the roof space and delivering the new boilers into place.