The contract for a delayed Hitchin housing project has "gone missing", councillors have heard -prompting derision

North Herts Council has spent £363,000 turning offices in Harkness Court into flats – a project which began in 2016/17 and remains incomplete.

At a meeting on Tuesday, November 7, councillors established that authority leaders are unable to find some of the original project documents, something which has "happened a bit during Covid with [contracts] falling into cupboard drawers".

According to informal project plans, the scheme will be more than four years late when contractors finish it, now due in February 2024.

Construction costs have grown by a third – from an anticipated £255,000 to a running subtotal of £340,000, with more to spend before the building is finished.

The process began in the financial year 2016/17, when councillors signed off on a larger £3million programme to provide housing at market rents at several sites.

Facing questions from scrutiny councillors, commercial service director Steve Crowley – who is an officer not an elected member – said: "In late 2021, we as officers realised there was some significant delay, and we have been meeting regularly to try to set dates."

Mr Crowley added staff began reporting to the council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee around that time – some five years after the project began.

"I have not managed to find a risk log," he said.

"I haven't managed to find an issue log.

"I'm sure if I could speak to the original people who were involved, they would have identified risk.

"I keep going back to the project management side of things – we now have a clear framework and documents in place, and if we were doing this now, I'm very confident those risks would have been identified."

A report for the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on November 7 lists a series of problems with the project.

The authority secured planning permission in Summer 2018 and had been due to finish transforming the old office block into homes by Autumn 2019.

Project teams discovered the building's garden was owned by a different organisation, and were able to transfer the land into North Herts Council's ownership.

Then, contractors had to pause and re-sequence their work because "arrangements for the installation of mains gas, electricity and water … were not addressed sufficiently early in the project".

Building regulations changed before the project began which set out that if there is a blaze, firefighters must be able to park within 45 metres of the furthest point of the residential building.

According to Mr Crowley, the distance which firefighters would have faced was in the region of 47 metres.

"This item was not identified during the design stage and was picked up near to the end of refurbishment work (May 2022)," the report reads.

"It has taken approximately 17 months to find a solution to this item, causing significant delay and loss of income to the council."

The Covid-19 pandemic and staff turnover are also identified as having caused a delay.

According to the report, project teams considered selling its property once they had secured planning permission.

"This was discounted as it would remove the potential to generate income and the increase in the capital value post-development was expected to be greater with planning plus the cost of development," it reads.

The authority estimated their £425,000 property would increase in value to £760,000 by the time it was fully converted.

Taking into account the cost of managing the flats, the authority expected to make £16,000 per year from its Harkness Court properties.

"The council has lost income during the four-year delay, which in basic terms would be £64,000," the report notes.

Councillor Adam Compton (Con, Royston Meridian), who chairs the cross-party Overview and Scrutiny Committee, said losing documents appears to have "happened a bit during Covid".

He said: "There has been an internal audit. There have been some lessons learned.

"What's been helpful to me is to see various things across the council which we could be looking into as Overview and Scrutiny, and things which we can take away from this particular project.

"We can use these lessons learned for the council long-term."

Cllr Compton will now prepare a report detailing the committee's findings for senior leaders at the Labour and Liberal Democrat-run authority.