The Move to Holyrood
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The Move to Holyrood |
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This year saw the historic move of the Parliament into its custom-built home at Holyrood. Over 100 individual projects and many changes in procedures and processes were required to make the new building work efficiently from day one. These took into account the change in scale of operations as well as the new visitor and events functions, and ranged from the small-scale procurement of items such as wheelchairs to setting up completely new services such as the crèche and public tours of the building. On Monday 3 August 2004 the first Parliament staff moved into their new offices. Throughout the first weeks of August the remaining staff and contractors moved in and set up services. In all over 1,000 staff, contractors, MSPs and their staff and media personnel moved.To ensure that business could start effectively and that services for visitors were running properly, a series of tests were carried out to check that staff were up-to-speed with the new facilities and procedures. Following small-scale tests during the second week of August, the full live test took place on 18 August. This involved staff playing the part of MSPs in the Chamber while members of the public were invited to come and test the public parts of the building, including the Chamber gallery. The exercise was vital to ensure that the building was ready to operate as a fully functioning and accessible parliament. Members and their staff had moved out of George IV Bridge by 20 August and started arriving at Holyrood on |
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