The Design Team is the council's award winning design consultancy, which undertakes the design and supervision of the majority of the council’s construction work relating to new build, conversion and refurbishment works.
Design team contributes to the Asset Management service to provide a one-stop holistic property service.
The Design Team service consists of three main groups:
- Architects and technologists
- Mechanical and electrical design engineers
- Full quantity surveying, cost analysis and a currently modest project management section
The multidisciplinary team undertake design work, cost control and construction management for potentially all of the council's stock of buildings, making the experience in the team wide and extensive.
The department also performs Electricity at Work Act inspections on behalf of the council.
In addition to council work the team is attracting work from other public bodies such as South Tyneside P.C.T. , Tyne and Wear Museums and Sport England.
Overall objectives of the service
- To provide the council and all other clients with a high quality multi-disciplinary design and maintenance service, ensuring that standards in building design and specification are improved wherever possible
- To provide clients with a design and technical advisory service specifically tailored to their needs
- To promote good design, maintenance, rigorous costing information and energy conservation standards to achieve excellent conditions in the built environment creating an environment to transform the borough into greener, cleaner safer place to live, learn and work
The team employs 29 full time staff and the total cost for the service for the financial year 2006/7 was £1.1 million.
This cost was recovered from design fees charged from a range of capital and other projects.
This effectively gives a zero budget to the council for the design team service in 2006/7.
Key events in 2007/8
- It is proposed that Asset Management, including the Design Team will be transferred to a new partnership. This will increase the scope for attracting work and provide access to wider professional resource
- A full Design Services Performance Indicator service will be introduced to show how best value is being achieved. Initially a target for completion of projects that are on time and on budget will be set at 80% of all projects undertaken
- Fixed fee charges for design services will be introduced to easily define customer spend
- The section will continue to operate with a strong customer focus and will find ways to ensure best value and best practice targets are achieved and surpassed
- The service will undertake more public relations exercises in schools and other council directorates to make potential users of the service more aware of our consultancy and the services we bring along with what asset management can offer
- Meet "break even" standard on the trading accounts and to benchmark services competitively to enable service efficiency improvements to be identified and introduced
- Continuously review resource requirements and expected income from project and other fees, and effect financial benefits to our clients by the reduction of our overhead costs
- To achieve continuous improvement year-on-year we are developing our client liaison role including improving assistance with brief preparation, cost, urban design and technical advice
- Investigate new ways of project procurement along with the procurement section to benefit our clients as recommended by the Latham & Egan reports on project procurement