The Agency's role: The Child Support Agency administers the assessment, collection and payment of child maintenance, with a view to ensuring that parents maintain their children where they can afford to, and that the burden on taxpayers is kept to a minimum. Their main activities include identifying and dealing with absent parents, collecting and passing on maintenance payments and keeping maintenance assessments up to date. Some 700 of their 7,500 staff work on the Longbenton site.
Accommodation requirements: The Child Support Agency requires accommodation that would resolve current problems with:
■ recruitment and retention of quality staff;
■ expense in the installation and maintenance of Information Technology cabling;
■ overheating of offices in summer and coldness in winter due to poor design and repeated heating system failures;
■ excessive corridor space; and
■ difficulties in maintaining contact across and between sites.
The Child Support Agency's views of the Private Finance project: The Agency's representative told us that the project would deliver a much better working environment than current arrangements and the earlier "Crown Build" proposals. They expressed concern that the management of the Private Finance service would be complex and felt that the Contributions Agency's contract manager would have to be knowledgeable about the contract and commercially astute. They praised the hard work of the project team but drew attention to activities that could have been done better including:
■ greater representation of users on the project board; and
■ earlier strategic thinking about staff numbers.