Row over £311m Home Office

The Home Office came under fire today over its luxurious new £311 million headquarters.

The site features £1.4 million of artworks, office chairs costing £500 each and "study cubicles" where civil servants can go to be alone.

For that price, critics argue, the Government could have built five children's hospitals, 15 secondary schools or paid the salaries of an extra 314 police officers for the next 25 years.

Next month the 3,500 staff will move to the complex, only half a mile from their current HQ in Westminster. Desks will be arranged in open-plan offices with fully-adjustable Mirra chairs from Herman Miller, which cost £500 retail but were bought for £200 each with bulk discount.

Officials will be encouraged to talk to colleagues in "breakout areas" or brightly-coloured "meeting pods" instead of sending emails.

The three blocks each have a central atrium with glass lifts. There are coffee bars and a restaurant. Motion-activated lights switch off automatically at night to save energy. Windows have shatterproof glass as a security measure.

To advise on decor, the Home Office hired an artist who was shortlisted for the 2002 Turner Prize. At a cost to taxpayers of £1million, Liam Gillick provided work and advice including a different colour scheme for each of the three blocks in the complex - blue, pink and orange.

Graphic prints adorn the walls. Flooring ranges from tiles to carpets and grey to rainbowcoloured. Gillick also added a coloured glass canopy and abstract metal panels above the entrance of the building, by architect Terry Farrell.

Details of the new HQ emerged after the Standard revealed how civil servants enjoy life's luxuries, including £78,000 spent by the Northern Ireland Office on newspapers and magazines such as Homes and Exteriors. Labour MPs said the department should have quit central London for an area where costs are lower.

But Home Secretary Charles Clarke claimed the new building would work out cheaper than existing premises, saving taxpayers £93million over 30 years. The decision to move to the new building, which included the purchase of the chairs, was taken in 2002 by his predecessor David Blunkett .

Two of Gillick's sculptures had to be redesigned after Westminster council's art experts complained that they "looked like an afterthought". Its public art panel likened the shiny metal structures to "parallel bars, a cycle rack and a climbing frame" and warned that they might be used as such.

Gillick's most unusual contribution is a "super graphic text" - a composition of light and dark glass which spells out a phrase across the building but is designed to be illegible to passers-by. The sentence reads: "A place to meet, think, inform, plan, discuss, persuade, change, develop and deliver." A council report says: "The result will be largely abstract, the viewer perhaps sensing that small sections of individual letters are being seen."

And every year an engraved slab will be laid in a walkway on the site. By 2031 they will spell out a statement about citizenship.

The Home Office said: 'The public sector has a duty to produce good buildings and good designs.' But it said Westminster council had insisted on art as a condition of planning permission. The council accepted responsibility but insisted the result was a "landmark building".

At the other end of the price scale, the building will also display 60 artworks by prisoners who were paid less than £70 each.

In 1996, when the Tories were in power, the Home Office decided to leave its current HQ near St James's Park after a review found that it would be cheaper to abandon the Sixties tower than refurbish it. Officials struck a private finance initiative deal to build a new base on the site of the old Marsham Towers, pulled down as an eyesore.

An alternative site by Waterloo station was rejected as " inaccessible to Parliament and the rest of Whitehall". Mandarins resisted pressure to leave London, claiming ministers and staff needed to stay near the Commons.

The Home Office forecast in 1998 that all its 3,200 central London staff would fit in the new building. By this year the staff total had spiralled to 4,900 and officials admitted they would have to find a separate base for the Prison Service, adding to costs.

David Davis, Tory shadow home secretary, said: "Taxpayers are not getting value for money from a Home Office that spends millions of pounds on new offices rather than on frontline services.

"Instead of spending £311million on new offices, the Home Office could have provided more than 6,000 constables to be on the beat fighting crime."

Mark Oaten MP, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "The public will rightly question why the Government has felt it necessary to spend so extravagantly on art and colour advice when it could have been building more hospitals and schools and putting more police officers on our streets."