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

Chief Operating Officer

Gurvinder is the Chief Operating Officer and has been with the GDC since July 2008 and has held a number of different posts and joined the Executive Team in March 2015, as well as being Interim Chief Executive Officer for seven months from November 2023. He has operational responsibility for customer services, annual retention, business planning, IT, risk management, finance and procurement, and facilities, involved in managing change 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.

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

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