A DEAL has been struck to turn an empty building into a fire brigade headquarters – and end the scandal of it costing taxpayers more than £100,000 a month.

Durham and Darlington fire chiefs have been awarded £1.8m of Government cash to make use of the North-East Fire Control Centre, in Belmont, Durham City, moving out of their present base in Framwellgate Moor.

The agreement promises to deliver significant improvements to the handling of emergency 999 calls and speed up response times.

The centre has call line identification and an automatic vehicle location system, replacing what Government officials called an “increasingly unreliable” system, that is 20 years old.

The announcement also brings to an end the longrunning – and enormously expensive – saga of Labour’s attempts to replace 46 fire control rooms with nine regional centres, at a cost of more than £1bn.

Ministers argued that only a state-of-the-art control room in Belmont – for the entire North-East – would enable firefighters to respond more quickly to incidents. But the FiReControl project turned into one of the most embarrassing IT disasters of Labour’s period in office, running massively over-budget and suffering endless delays.

The National Audit Office condemned the idea as “flawed from the outset” because of “broad-brush and inaccurate estimates of costs and benefits and an unrealistic delivery timetable”.

Last year, it was revealed that the vacant Belmont building was costing the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) £97,000-a-month in rent – plus £43,000-a-month in other fees.

The taxpayer is tied in to a 20-year lease with the Control Centre General Partner, a company based in Jersey owned by a City investment bank, which meant the total cost was expected to hit £46m, by 2027.

It was not clear how quickly Durham and Darlington Fire Authority will make the switch. No one was available for comment yesterday.

Meanwhile, both Cleveland Fire and Rescue Authority and its counterpart in North Yorkshire were told to carry out further work on their proposals before funding could be awarded.

The DCLG declined to say what was holding up the bids, but said it wanted the negotiations to be concluded “by the end of June”.

Cleveland Fire Brigade said it was in the dark about the delay, but said it was already investing in its own “state-of-the-art call handling and mobilisation system”, at its base in Hartlepool.

A spokesman said: “We are fully committed to working closely with the Government to try to ensure that our proposals meet with their approval within the appropriate timescale.”

No one was available to comment at North Yorkshire Fire Authority, currently based in Northallerton and once due to move to a single Yorkshire control centre, in Wakefield.

Fire Minister Bob Neill said the Durham and Darlington plan had passed the tests of delivering improvements to “resilience, efficiency and technology”.