Contractors Lowry Building & Civil Engineering has started work to develop a new Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service (NIFRS) Logistics Support Centre in Belfast.

The £7.8 million project on Boucher Crescent is expected to be complete by spring 2018.

HLM, a leading architecture and design company with offices in Belfast, designed the new Logistics Support Centre, which will be the main hub for the maintenance, servicing and repair of the NIRFS's fire appliances and operational equipment.

The service's current workshops at Central Fire Station in Belfast, NIFRS Headquarters in Lisburn and the equipment workshop in the Learning & Development Centre will all relocate to Boucher Crescent. As the stores will all be located under one roof it will allow for the effective provision of supplies to all parts of the organisation and promote greater control across the business. The standby Regional Control Centre will also be located here.

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Approximately 40 NIFRS staff will be based at the new bespoke facility, which with the benefit of support services alongside will greatly enhance efficiency. The NIFRS will also run its technical communication workshops from the new base.

Steven Lennon, Associate Architect at HLM said: "We are pleased to be moving forward with this key capital project for NIFRS, which is designed to optimise efficiency by bringing together NIFRS operational support services from multiple sites to a new, focal Logistics Support Centre. We are proud to have designed a facility to help improve the efficiency of critical operational support functions for NIFRS."