Costs warning if La Mare is to be used longer as a sixth form
THE States will be dealing with an ‘ever-ramping risk’ of material costs should it need to keep an interim sixth form centre at La Mare De Carteret beyond 2029, the official who leads ESC’s redevelopment of the Les Ozouets campus has warned.
Ed Gowan, a director of project and consultancy services firm CBO Projects, was addressing questions from Scrutiny Management Committee members surrounding the ongoing work at the Les Ozouets campus, which is intended to be the permanent home of the new Sixth Form Centre from 2029.
Before then, the sixth form is to be relocated from Les Varendes to La Mare next September.
Work on the second phase of the Les Ozouets project has been put in doubt after Policy & Resources identified it as being at risk as it draws up its mini-Budget proposals for 2025 and 2026.
When asked what would be done with La Mare should the construction of the sixth form at Les Ozouets run on longer than anticipated, Mr Gowan said confirmation had been received from independent advisers that any intention to use the site for a window of what he recalled as being five years was a ‘reasonable assumption’.
‘The advice we received was that we will not hit a magic point where the building is unusable,' he said.
'It is not as if there is a time bomb issue, such as some form of asbestos.'
However, he said that, should La Mare need to be used beyond 2029, as a sixth form or for anything else, the States would need to consider an ‘ever-growing’ contingency budget for material costs.
‘We can provide assurance that there will not be some moment where La Mare becomes unusable, but rather the cost of keeping it usable is likely to grow beyond that five-year window.’
He said that an additional £80,000 had been taken out of the budget for minor capital projects over the summer to go towards bringing the facilities at La Mare up to standard for the next four years.
This was on top of an anticipated spend of between £104,000 and £119,000 to invest in the site in a way which was not re-usable when the sixth form eventually moved to Les Ozouets.
‘The overall level investment is still very low,’ he said.
Regarding the first phase of work at Les Ozouets – the construction of the Guernsey Institute – Mr Gowan said that ‘good progress’ had been made, with demolition of the former St Peter Port School completed and enabling works having started.
He confirmed that a procurement process to agree on a supply chain for prime contractor Rok was due to finish before Christmas, with the total number of sub-contractor packages likely to be in double digits.
‘We’d be anticipating bringing a request to P&R to enter into a full contract for all that work early in 2025.’
