Department for Work and Pensions: Buildings

The department regularly reviews its estate to ensure it meets the needs of customers and colleagues, supports service delivery and represents value for money for the taxpayer. The Workplace Transformation Programme began in 2021 to ensure the department has an estate that is the right size and shape to meet current and future business needs. It is aligned to the department and wider government’s ambition of creating a smaller, better and greener public estate.

While we do not undertake ‘regional occupancy modelling’, we seek to maintain a broad geographic distribution of offices across Great Britain. However, to ensure offices remain viable and the estate is aligned to operational requirements, the size and distribution of the DWP estate may change over time. Decisions on individual offices are not taken in isolation. When making decisions about the estate, the programme assesses the impact of proposed changes on:

• customer service delivery and operational resilience – working with business leaders to ensure no disruption to customers as a result of estate changes
• value for money – ensuring the department is only paying for the estate it needs
• office capacity and utilisation – our office capacity across the network is larger than our headcount by about a third
• building quality, sustainability and size – the programme seeks to move away from low quality, inefficient, smaller sites to fewer, better, larger and more sustainable buildings
• workforce requirements – ensuring the location and design of our buildings meets the needs of our workforce
• staffing levels – estate rationalisation activity is not delivered with the aim of reducing the department’s headcount, and our first priority is to retain, retrain or redeploy impacted colleagues.
• lease events

The programme recently announced consolidation activity impacting nine of our office buildings:

• Blackpool Peel Park
• Derby Holborn House
• Glasgow Northgate
• Halifax Dean Clough Mills
• Hyde Beech House
• Liverpool Belle Vale
• Motherwell Johnstone House
• Sunderland Wear View House
• Torquay Cotswold House

The department continually reviews our entire estate to ensure it is aligned to local requirements. Whenever the department makes decisions about our estate, our priority is to communicate with our colleagues first, followed by impacted MPs and members of the devolved administrations where applicable.

Further information will continue to be published through these established processes and in accordance with commercial and operational considerations.

The programme’s business case is regularly scrutinised to assess whether it measures up to the standards set out in Managing Public Money. A recent summary of the key points from the Accounting Officer’s Assessment of the Workplace Transformation Programme was made available to Parliament in April 2026 and can be found on GOV.UK. The Department does not routinely publish information where doing so could prejudice its commercial position, ongoing estate planning activity or the delivery of value for money for the taxpayer.