£50,000: Catastrophic power outage left Nottingham City Council with a big bill

On March 12, a ‘once in a lifetime’ electrical failure caused power to go out at the council’s Loxley House headquarters for around a week, causing disruption to waste collections and Job Centre appointments.

The authority said that although the emergency generator was fully fuelled and operational, the fault prevented power from reaching the network, leading to an ‘unprecedented loss of key on-site systems’.

One of the Government-appointed officials overseeing improvements previously said the outage exposed the need for a “critical change” in improving the authority’s IT infrastructure.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request, submitted by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, has now revealed the total cost to the authority – and thus the taxpayer – was more than £50,000.

Corporate landlord services (CLS) spent £43,948 in its response to the power outage, while the council’s IT department spent £8,032.

When asked if any expertise had been brought in to prevent an incident from happening again, the council’s response said a high voltage specialist was employed at a cost of £2,000, while a supplier to design an electrical tripping unit cost £1,000.

Communication with the public was undertaken using existing channels and did not incur specific additional costs.

The council said that without electrical power, IT servers could not function.

Loss of power and the failure of the backup power systems resulted in multiple IT systems and services failing to work, which had a significant effect on the operation of council services.

The costs related to the urgent business continuity measures that needed to be implemented to minimise disruption and enable vital services to continue.

A series of recommendations has since been agreed and assigned to the relevant service areas.

These include measures to strengthen electrical resilience, improve server redundancy, and further enhance the council’s emergency planning and communication systems.

Bulwell councillor Ethan Radford, deputy leader and executive member for finance and resources, said after the incident: “This was an unprecedented incident and one that tested our systems and our organisation.

“The response from colleagues across the council – from IT and facilities to emergency planning, communications and frontline teams – was exceptional.

“Thanks to their professionalism and dedication, essential services continued, the most vulnerable residents remained supported, and we recovered quickly and safely.

“We have also taken the opportunity to learn from the incident and strengthen our resilience for the future.”