An Ipswich tax office has spent almost a quarter of a million pounds in a fight to rid its offices of bed bugs over two years.
The HM Revenues and Customs (HMRC) office in Brooke Lawrance House in Civic Drive has undergone many treatments to get rid of the bugs including steam cleans and sniffer dogs.
A total of £235,107 has been spent treating the issue that appeared at the office in the summer of 2022, and costs are ongoing.
An HMRC spokesperson said: “The health and safety of our employees is our top priority and we’ve followed expert advice to treat and manage the bed bugs since they were first discovered. There have been no further sightings since January.
“Around 500 colleagues are based there, the cost is about £450 per person over the two-year period.”
The HMRC office rents out two and a half floors of the town centre’s AXA building.
The formerly infested office block is currently up for sale for offers in excess of £15million.
Break down of costs
The cost of all the treatments have been broken down following a Freedom of Information request by this paper and some of the expenses are listed:
Sniffer dogs, traps, bed bug screenings and pest products have cost £50,773.
Trained dogs are very good at detecting the pheromones emitted by the bugs and can be taught to recognise them in the same way as they can learn the scent of drugs, explosives and stashes of money.
If the group of bugs is big enough even a human can smell their odour.
Steam treatments have cost £42,629.
Steam is used to burn any insects that can be found and is particularly effective against eggs and nymphs.
In January of this year, the heat treatment of office chairs and insecticidal spray treatment cost £29,902.
The removal and treatment of contaminated personal protective equipment (PPE) has cost £2,901.
Insecticide and dust treatments have cost £4,496.
The hygiene and infection prevention company Ecolab has charged £19,738.60 for pest control and from July to November in 2022 £14,367.22 was spent on flea monitoring, bed bug home monitor kits and treatments.
A guide to bed bugs
Bed bugs prefer to live near beds, but they will happily live in the crevices of office chairs, or the fibres of a carpet or inside electrical items.
They typically ingest their blood meals furtively from sleeping people at night and their abdomens fatten as they do so.
However, they can adapt their feeding patterns to suit the daylight hours when infesting an office and can hitch rides on people’s clothing all over the workplace and into their homes.
They use their sharp mouthparts to pierce the skin and suck blood for up to 10 minutes.
Their bites are often itchy and a severe allergic reaction, is possible but rare.
According to the pest control company Rentokil each female bug can lay about 1-7 eggs a day, which can hatch around a week later and develop into adults in another 3 weeks.
In May, a spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said it would continue to monitor the issue.
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