Taxpayers will foot £105,700 bill if new SPA HQ not suitable

SCOTLAND’S new police authority may not move i nto its new c ampus earmarked by ministers, despite the government signing a £ 250,000 lease on the property.

The SNP administration approved a five- year deal for the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) headquarters to be at Bremner House in Stirling.

However, serious doubts hang over the move, which i s now described as only an “option” due to potential IT costs and questions over the size of the organisation. A U-turn could cost the taxpayer more than £100,000.

Labour MSP Graeme Pearson, a former senior police officer who was director general of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, said he feared the problems could cause an “obscene waste of public money”.

The move to a single police force has been fraught with teething problems. Top of the list has been a power struggle between Police Scotland, the new force led by Stephen House, and its watchdog, the SPA.

The two sides battled for months about which had control over a range of corporate functions, which finally led to an uneasy truce.

The row over the scope of the SPA now includes its location. In October, just weeks after the interim SPA was set up, the SNP Government pushed ahead with a deal to base the body in Stirling.

The five-year lease, signed by a senior civil servant in the Justice Department, will cost £52,850 per year for more than 5000sqft of office space.

However, the SPA’s range of corporate responsibilities has since grown and Bremner House is also not “cabled up” to receive sensitive police information.

A police service source said: “The SPA does not know whether it is going to be using that building. It needs to share information securely and there’s a fundamental investment question to that.”

The source added: “The SPA also needs to know the ultimate shape of the organisation. We thought it would be a secretariat, but it now has functions such as HR and finance.”

The interim SPA

is presently