Fareham's council HQ needs £4.73m of repairs, decided on 7 September. A full refurbishment would exceed £25m, so the failed cooling plant stays on hire.
Fareham Borough Council is being asked to spend £4,730,000 keeping the Civic Offices standing up for another five years. The decision goes to the Executive at 5pm on Monday 7 September.
The tower on Civic Way is the council’s main building and its front counter. It was built in 1974 and 1975, so it is now over 50 years old. The council owns it outright and pays no rent or debt on it.
The report by the Director of Planning and Regeneration is blunt about why the money is needed now. Investment “can no longer be reasonably deferred”. Lifts, ventilation, roof, windows, cooling, the building management system and parts of the electrical infrastructure are all described as in poor condition or at the end of their serviceable life.
The air conditioning has already failed
The report carries a condition table for each part of the building. Six of the ten elements are rated poor.
| Element | Condition | Proposed works |
|---|---|---|
| Roof | Poor | Life extension to the covering and cladding |
| Windows | Poor | Inspection regime and some glazing replacement |
| Ventilation | Poor | Works to improve reliability and longevity |
| Cooling | Poor | Existing equipment has failed; hired equipment kept for the whole plan |
| Building management system | Poor | Complete replacement |
| Lifts | Poor | Overhaul, new control system, doors and interiors |
| Structure and facade | Fair | Inspection regime and minor maintenance |
| Heating | Fair | Boiler life extension and resilience work |
| Fire and security | Fair | Replace or life extend the entrances |
| Fabric and facilities | Fair | Main toilets refurbished, staircases redecorated |
The cooling line is the one to read twice. The council’s own cooling plant has failed, and the plan is not to replace it. Hired equipment stays in place for the five years the plan runs.
Why not just do the job properly
The report sets out four options and rejects three of them.
- Do nothing. Discounted, because the building’s condition means work is needed to keep occupying it and to meet the council’s duties to its tenants.
- A full 25-year refurbishment. The building’s thermal performance is substandard and it is heated by gas, so its energy rating is poor. Getting to a low carbon heating system, likely air source heat pumps, would need the roof and walls insulated first. Early costings put this at more than £25 million.
- Move out. Space at Whiteley and Lakeside could meet the council’s basic needs, but both are outside the borough and both would bring rent, service charges, business rates, fit-out and relocation costs. Moving would also leave the Civic Offices empty, with holding costs and, the report says, “limited viable options for alternative use”.
- A five-year asset management plan. The recommended option: replace what has to be replaced, extend the life of the rest, and leave the big decision to whoever comes next.
That last point is the whole argument. Fareham Borough Council will not exist for much longer. The government confirmed on 25 March 2026 that Fareham joins a new South East Hampshire unitary authority from April 2028, alongside Gosport, Havant and Portsmouth. Elections to a shadow authority are expected in May 2027. The report argues that committing to a £25m refurbishment, or to a new building, before the new authority has said what it wants would not be prudent.
Where the money comes from
Of the £4,730,000 total, £4,330,000 is capital and £400,000 is revenue. The council has already approved £3,005,200 of the capital in its existing programme. The report asks for a further £1,324,800 from unallocated capital receipts, and for the revenue budget to grow by £250,000 in 2027/28 and £150,000 in 2029/30. A 10% contingency is built into the figure.
The detailed budget sits in a confidential appendix. The council says publishing the values would weaken its hand when it negotiates the design and construction contract.
Contracts of £250,000 and under would be awarded by the Director of Planning and Regeneration. Anything above that would need the section 151 officer consulted first. Rather than one big contract, the council plans to tender specialist packages separately.
The building pays for a good part of itself
The council has let out the equivalent of nearly three floors to other public bodies. The current tenants are the Hampshire, Southampton and Isle of Wight Clinical Commissioning Group, the Probation Service and the UK Health Security Agency. Telecommunications companies rent space on the roof.
In 2025/26 those tenants generated more than £450,000 in income against annual running costs of roughly £900,000.
The council also commissioned AMION Consulting to assess what the building is worth to the town centre. That assessment found the Civic Offices support:
- 366 direct jobs on site
- a further 33 indirect jobs in the town centre
- more than £45.5 million a year in economic value
- 418 jobs across the borough as a whole
The report puts that at 6.0% of town centre employment and 10.3% of its economic output.
One thing the plan deliberately leaves out is energy efficiency work. The government confirmed in June 2026 that it intends privately rented non-domestic buildings over 1,000 square metres to reach an EPC rating of B from 2031. Each lettable floor at the Civic Offices is under that threshold and separately certificated. The council’s consultants think it will be able to register an exemption, because the improvement costs are unlikely to be recovered through electricity savings inside the seven-year payback period. So energy works are parked “pending clarity on the building’s long-term future”.
What it means for you
If you use the council in person, nothing closes. The ground floor reception is the main place to deal with council services face to face, and floor 8 holds the council chamber and the mayor’s parlour. The report says staff and services will not need to be moved out while the work happens, and that the most disruptive jobs will be done outside operational hours. Where a shutdown is unavoidable, the council says it will give notice.
On the money: the capital comes from receipts the council has already banked, not from a new charge, but the £400,000 of revenue growth goes into the Medium-Term Finance Strategy, which is the pot your council tax feeds. All of the costs are budgets at this stage and will be reviewed once detailed surveys are done.
The meeting is public. The Executive sits at 5pm on Monday 7 September in the Collingwood Room at the Civic Offices, and the full agenda and reports are published, including the Civic Offices report itself. If you are driving in, check our guide to parking in Fareham first.
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