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Sion Barry

When the first BBC Wales staff will move into their new £120m headquarters

The first of 1,200 staff from BBC Wales will move into its new headquarters in the centre of Cardiff in October.

And addressing a meeting of Cardiff Breakfast Club, its head of digital and marketing, Richard Thomas, said the project, at the Central Square development in the centre of Cardiff, was on time and on budget.

And he said it would be the most technologically advanced broadcasting centre in Europe.

Next week BBC Cymru Wales signage with be put up at the 150,000 sq ft headquarters immediately in front of Cardiff Central Train Station.

While the project has a £120m price tag, it has been offset by what is understood to have been a £20m contribution from the sale of its existing Llandaff site to house builder Taylor Wimpey.

They will start on a 400 home development once BBC Wales has vacated the site.

The first tranche of staff to relocate from the Llandaff site,  will be in Mr Thomas' digital and marketing department which employs around 90.

He said the relocation process will take six months to complete with the new HQ fully operational next April.

He said: "I keep being asked is it to budget, is it to time? And yes and yes is the simple answer, which I think is quite remarkable when you think of some of the technological changes and investment.

"It cannot all be about the building, but a tool for us to do our job to serve our audiences better.

"That's why we were very clear in terms of our design brief in what we wanted out of our building. And there are three key words there: open, connected and collaborative.

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"The minute you walk into that the building the moment you will understand what we mean by that."

Mr Thomas said that members of the people will be able to come into the atrium of the Foster + Partners designed building.

He added: "There will be big screens in the atrium and tours and it will be all about creating a fantastic audience experience. We will be engaging with audiences in way that the BBC hasn't probably been able to do in any of its other sites to date.

"This will be about the most open a BBC building that could be, and that was absolutely at the heart of the inspiration for it."

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He said on each floor there will be collaboration zones for staff, independent production companies and the creative sector to be "able to come together and share ideas".

"Basically everybody will be in a 30 seconds walk of one another. It is a completely different working environment," added Mr Thomas

The new building is half the size of the public service broadcasters' existing Llandaff split building site

Mr Thomas  said: "One of the reasons for that is that we are moving towards a scenario where we have got 15 people to 10 desks. So it is about hot-desking and flexible working."

There will only be 800 desks.

He said electrification of the Great Western Mainline to Paddington and its location next to Cardiff Central, would be of huge benefit.

Warning £738m South Wales Metro flagship rail project at risk from a no-deal Brexit  

Mr Thomas said, "We will only be hour and 40 minutes  from London when rail electrification is completed.

"Our ambition is that we get people calling in much more often. If you live west of Reading and possibly towards Swindon, it is probably quicker to come into the office in Cardiff then it will be to go to London. And I think that we need to take advantage of that and we will."

He said that rail's south Wales Metro project could also help it recruit more people from some of the more deprived communities of south Wales.

£50m of new transport projects for the south Wales Metro  

The building will also benefit from the latest in IP (internet protocol) broadcasting technology. 

Mr Thomas said: "We will also moving to a situation of transforming the technological infrastructure.

"We are going to be the most cutting edge broadcast building in Europe with live IP at its core, which means we wouldn't have massive sets of cabling running from one piece of equipment to another.

"Also the connections will be through fibre and any piece of equipment can link up with any other across the building."

Cardiff Breakfast Club is sponsored by Blake Morgan, Effective Communication, Stills Branding and Lloyds Banking Group. 

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