Sutton Council has big plans to sell off its offices and move to the High Street.

It claims its current home, built in 1975, is expensive to maintain and isn’t used by enough staff.

It comes as the council looks to completely change the town centre a year after it bought the St Nicholas Shopping Centre for £27 million in 2021.

The previous owner, an oversees financial investor, sold off the shopping centre at a loss to the council as it failed to make a profit due to falling trade

On Monday night (November 7), Sutton Council’s strategy and resources committee heard there is a “significant maintenance backlog” and that the authority has struggled to find other tenants to take on parts of the building.

The 10,000 square metre building is used by fewer than 250 staff a day. 

Now the council wants to find a development partner to draw up plans for what the town centre could look like.

The council offices will move, along with Sutton Library and Sutton College.

The council plans to sell off the civic centre, the closed Seacombe Theatre and Gibson Road Car Park  – which could be replaced with up to 600 new homes.

Another 400 new homes are expected to be built in the redeveloped shopping centre.

At the meeting, lead member for resources Councillor Sunita Gordon, said: “The [shopping centre] was bought for this very purpose, it isn’t that the council is going to start running shopping centres that isn’t our core job.

“This building is rather old and continuing to maintain it costs a lot of money.

"The pandemic has shifted the way we work there is a lot more hybrid working.

“There is the opportunity to create a proper front door for the council where people walk in and they can actually interact with the services that we offer.

"It is an opportunity we should explore further.”

Conservative councillor Neil Garratt said that, while he supports the plans in principle, it was not made clear to the council that the shopping centre would be home to a new civic centre.

Head of revenue Richard Simpson said the council was finding a development partner which would test the financial case for the project.

Another Conservative councillor, Tom Drummond, said he was “disappointed” the committee had just over a week to consider the paper.

He added: “I don’t think we’ve been given enough time to read 413 pages and scrutinise properly.”

Councillor Tim Foster of the Sutton Independent Residents Group urged caution in trying to deliver too much and said more office space may be needed in the future.

He said: “We are already seeing a trend where companies are bringing people back into the office.

"To make a plan that says we need a much smaller space seems to me to be a bit short sighted.”

The council is now set to move forward with plans for a new civic centre complex on the site of the St Nicholas Centre.

The next stage will be to find a developer to work on the plans with the authority.