Nottingham Custody suite

Nottinghamshire Police needed a new 50-cell custody suite, a flagship for staff wellbeing and the modern-day handling of detainees. Willmott Dixon brought CAD21 in from RIBA Stage 1, through the SCAPE Framework, on the strength of the suites the two had already delivered in partnership.

A building like this has to work from the day it opens and keep working around the clock, so there’s little room to put things right after the event. The parts of the build that get trimmed to save money tend to be the ones that cause trouble for years, and the specialist security package has to be designed in early, which pulls against the usual procurement timeline.

Five years of previous custody scheme experience meant CAD21 arrived with a head start and ‘The CODE standard’ (Custody Options Designed and Engineered) had been created by CAD21 which gave a build-and-cost answer to the 50-cell brief early on but behind that sat something more useful: real operational data. After the previous custody suite opened in Grimsby, CAD21 spent its first year of operation checking actual energy use against the original predictions. The gap showed how one of these buildings is really used rather than how the specification assumes, and that fed a greater level of demand-led control on the ventilation at Nottingham.

Three things decide whether the building performs: how services distribute into the cell wing, the levels and voids above the interview corridors, and how services detail into the pre-cast. CAD21 coordinated and locked in all three at RIBA Stage 2, before the second-stage tender, so they held when the costs came back. Knowing the observations that NPEG, the Ministry of Justice’s review group, tends to raise, the design answered them in advance, which kept the reviews from slowing the programme or the police team’s sign-offs.

The suite was completed in July 2021, with solar covering 10% of its energy from renewables.

Having successfully delivered the Lincoln Bluelight Campus with our Nottingham office, the Willmott Dixon and CAD21 teams had an excellent established working relationship, therefore we had no hesitation to approach CAD21 again as a trusted partner and expert in building services design for Custody. CAD21 delivered the building services design on time and on budget