Hearings move to Wimpole Street as the final part of the estates programme

29 January, 2020 by Gurvinder Soomal

As the final part of our wider strategic estates programme, and following the opening of our operational hub in Birmingham in 2019, we have now completed the refit of our London office in Wimpole Street, which has included creating five hearing suites.

Our hearing suites now are all in-house, allowing us to move out of our rented space in Smithfield, which will result in savings of circa £1.47 million pa.

The refit at Wimpole Street was completed with a significant emphasis on ensuring value for money and thinking environmentally, avoiding waste wherever possible. Throughout the refit programme we looked to upcycle and reuse existing assets where feasible. This included:

re-using surplus furniture from a fellow regulator to furnish all five of our hearing suites, which we obtained free of charge, creating savings of around £80k
re-using existing furniture and fittings that were there before the refit, including doors, glazed panels, tables and chairs
re-using existing furniture and TV screen to fit out our relocated Boardroom
re-using some of the surplus furniture and IT equipment to support the fit-out of 32 extra desks in our Birmingham office

To ensure we were delivering value for money following the previous refit in 2014-15, we also conducted an asset impairment exercise which identified only circa £44k of the original work being disposed of, which represents less than 0.5% of the original cost of the previous refit.

This brings to a close our two-year estates programme that will result in circa £50 million net savings over 15 years as planned and has been a key contributor and factor to the reduced Annual Retention Fee levels.

Gurvinder Soomal

Executive Team

Gurvinder is the Chief Operating Officer, with responsibility for Registration and Corporate Resources and leading the Birmingham operations hub on behalf of the Chief Executive. He has been with the GDC since July 2008 and was brought in specifically to manage the end of the dental care professional transition period, and to transform the registration function. Gurvinder has held a number of different posts and joined the Executive Team in March 2015. During his time at the GDC he has also taken operational responsibility for customer services, annual retention, CPD, the Overseas Registration Exam and more recently, business planning, IT, risk management, finance and procurement, and facilities. He has been involved in significant structured change management throughout the organisation. Gurvinder has a strong commercial background coming from the retail and e-commerce sector, specialising in business change and process design and improvement.

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