Lights at police centre to cost 'disturbing' £500k to replace

Changing the lights at a police building will cost more than £500,000 – a figure described at a meeting as "strikingly large".

The new lighting system at Dyfed-Powys Police's strategic centre at Llangunnor, near Carmarthen, will replace one that architects have said is outdated and for which parts are unavailable.

The new contract includes LED lighting and controls that have heat-mapping technology, meaning they can be dimmed to save energy, and replacing external lights.

Panel vice chairman Keith Evans said he was "a bit disturbed by the cost", but police crime commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn, who approved the project, said everything was done within governance frameworks.

A report said the lighting system at the centre, which was built 15 years ago, had cost £6.4m and was, according to architects, hard to maintain due to the redundancy of the fittings and the unavailability of parts.

The contract for the project was awarded to a construction firm at a cost of £555,576, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

"This is based on financial cost evaluation, contract terms, route to market and timely delivery of the works with escalating material costs," the report said.

Llywelyn told a meeting of the Dyfed-Powys police and crime panel on Wednesday he and his chief financial officer reviewed proposed expenditure by the force above a certain threshold.

He said everything was done within governance frameworks, and responding to a point raised by Evans, said there was a degree of "rubber stamping" by him in some instances. He added that modernising the lighting system came "at a significant cost".

Panel chairman Prof Ian Roffe said the strategic command centre was, in his view, the best value public building ever built in Wales - until he saw the lighting replacement cost.

"I thought it was strikingly large," he said.