Job 600 To Be Ready For Next Parliament

Rehabilitation work on Job 600 is almost complete and the facility will be ready for use by the next Parliament, consultants of the project have indicated. About 95 per cent of the work will be completed by the end of August, this year, with the remaining five per cent expected to be accomplished by the end of the year. The project consultants told members of the Joint Committee of Finance and Works and Housing of Parliament, who inspected the progress of work in AccraTuesday that the building would be ready for use after the offices had been furnished and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) centre had been completed. When completed, the building would provide 252 offices, comprising 192 standard offices for ordinary MPs, 54 standard plus offices for chairmen of committees of Parliament and 12 offices for the leadership, two of which had been specially designed for the Majority and Minority leaders. With the completion of the project, MPs who will be elected during the forthcoming general election and will take office on January 7, 2013 will not have the problem of office accommodation, which their predecessors faced. Briefing the press after the inspection, the Resident Engineer of the project, Mr Ekow Bentil Enchil, said the scope of work under the project included structural retrofitting of the physical structure of the Tower Block, provision of offices for MPs and ancillary staff, extensive rehabilitation of the electrical and mechanical services needed for the facility and the provision of fire and safety protection facility. Other facilities that will be included in the project after its completion are an auditorium, a kitchen, gymnasium, chapel, mosque, research centre, library, clinic, bank, post office and auditorium/meeting and committee rooms. For his part, the Chairman of the ADK Consortium, consultants to the project, Mr Michael Krakue, stated that the House would be faced with the challenge of providing offices for 23 more MPs in the next Parliament since the current Tower Block (JOB 600) could only contain 252 MPs. He suggested that what could be done in that situation was the redesigning of the recently constructed office annex block for 50 or more offices to cater for the rest of the MPs while the remaining would be left in anticipation of the creation of more constituencies.