Cabinet Office Minister Jeremy Quin visited Manchester to break ground on the near-£40million government hub taking place in the city's burgeoning First Street district. Some 2,500 civil servants will be based in the new northern hub - next to the HOME entertainment complex between Oxford Road and Deansgate rail stations - from 2025.
About 1,800 already based offices at Piccadilly Gate will relocate to First Street to make way for HS2, but there will be 700 new jobs which will move from the South East to Manchester. Mr Quin told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the move was a ‘really important milestone’.
“We’ve got an objective to get 22,000 out of London and to places like Manchester and we’re now over halfway there,” he said. “We said we’d do it in 10 years, we’re over halfway in just three so there’s a lot of progress being made. So that’s good news for Manchester and for the whole UK.”
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Mr Quin said he expected about eight out of 10 jobs advertised for the hub would be filled by local people. “That’s great because it means that we, in the UK government as a whole, have insight and input from people from all over the country working across their communities thinking about what really matters to them feeding into the overall government initiatives,” he said.
He went on: “By moving people out [of London], we’re saving well over £1billion a year in running costs and making £5billion by selling off properties or vacating properties and ending the leases, so in the long run it’s cheaper for the tax payer.
“But this isn’t just about money. It’s also about having insight from around the country and making sure the UK Government is connected to every one of our communities more broadly and that has its own benefits.”
Mr Quin said that the move of civil service roles to Manchester is expected to generate £30m for every 1,000 government roles located in the city.
He added: “ So it’s not just the jobs here working for the government, it’s all the interactions they have here locally, both in terms of the impact on the local economy and what that brings to central government decision making.”
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