A HUGE jobs boost came today with news of a major land deal for a Huddersfield firm.

FMG Support have agreed to buy a former car park from Kirklees Council – and confirmed plans to take on 100 extra staff when the deal goes through, with hopefully more to come.

The land deal, in St Andrew’s Road, will enable the firm to expand and take on scores of extra workers.

Council chiefs have also vowed to ensure that parking spaces that will vanish in the new build will be replaced.

The Cabinet met in private to approve the sale the land to enable a new headquarters to be developed in Huddersfield for the district’s largest private sector employer and on a prime site that will boost the economy of the town.

To meet its new expansion plans, FMG Support is proposing to build a new headquarters of a minimum of 50,000sq ft and a potential of 80,000 sq ft of top quality office accommodation, over four floors.

It will include about 300 car parking spaces for its employees.

FMG Support, the UK’s largest independent fleet performance improvement company, currently employs around 400 people in Kirklees and will create a further 100 jobs following a national contract win with Government organisation the Highways Agency earlier this year.

The recruitment will take six to eight months.

The Cabinet approved the sale of 2.0 acres of the 3.2 acres St Andrew’s Road car park to the firm for its new base.

Clr Ken Sims, Cabinet member for regeneration, and Clr David Hall, Cabinet member for transportation, pledged that the implications for any loss of car parking had been taken into account and would be compensated for in a wider long-stay car parking replacement programme for Huddersfield as a whole.

Clr Sims said: “At a time when the local, regional and national economy is being hit by the ‘credit crunch’ it is heartening and reassuring to see proposals of this nature from a locally-based company leading the field nationally in its activities and area of business.

“FMG Support is a locally born and bred company that has seen its business take off and grow into being the largest of its kind in the UK.

“It is keen to stay in Huddersfield, and we are determined to ensure that it stays in Huddersfield.

“The alternative would be that FMG Support would develop its new headquarters outside Kirklees and we would lose around 500 jobs from our area. The more jobs and companies we keep in Huddersfield and Kirklees the more the local economy benefits from the knock-on effects of that local presence.”

FMG chief executive Nick Brown said: “I hope it’s good news for the town as well as for the firm.

“The Highways Agency contract is a major deal for us but we also have others in the pipeline and there could be more jobs created.

“We would hope to start building in spring next year and perhaps move in early summer 2010.

“We have outgrown our current premises in St Andrew’s Road and also have offices on three floors of the old NTL building in Market Street. I hope we can create a landmark building on the new site.”

On the car parking issues Clr Hall said: “The FMG Support proposals include car parking for its own employees, so it would not be taking up public parking spaces on the rest of the car park site.

“The part of the car park nearest to the main Wakefield Road – which is the most used part of the public car park – will remain in council ownership as a car park and will be surfaced to bring it up to the standard we want to provide for motorists.

“Most of the week the car park area as a whole is very much under-used. Half of the 500 spaces are contracted to the University in any case and as part of the replacement plans we have earmarked for those to be relocated nearby, which would leave 200 public spaces available on the part of the car park we will retain and properly surface. In practical terms the loss of public car parking will be minimal.

“The overall car parking plan for the town also covers for the loss of long-stay parking under proposals for the new Sports Centre on the Spring Grove car park, and other developments in the pipeline.

“We will be finalising the overall programme in the coming weeks but anticipate that it will result overall in a slight increase in long-stay parking, and maintaining shoppers’ parking provision.”