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Deputy Al Brouard has said that Duchess of Kent House at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital is a "substantial building which remains integral to the HSC operation".
Some of the seven deputies behind a requête submitted last week want to see Duchess of Kent House demolished and replaced with staff accommodation.
But the President of the Committee for Health & Social Care has claimed that demolishing the building "would be a waste of a current resource".
Deputy Brouard said that around "110 to 120 members of HSC staff regularly use" the building.
Responding to Rule 14 questions submitted by Deputy Neil Inder, he listed the following departments as currently operating from the building: corporate services, finance, human resources, off-island and client teams, data quality, public health services, quality and safety, procurement and occupational health.
And the number of staff there is expected to increase soon with a covid-19 vaccination team and officials involved in transformation projects moving in.
Pictured: Deputy Al Brouard (left) was responding to Rule 14 questions submitted by Deputy Neil Inder (right).
The requête proposes that such projects would require the approval of the States' Assembly.
Several signatories of the requête - including the lead requérant, Deputy Steve Falla, and Deputies Lindsay de Sausmarez, Peter Roffey and Tina Bury, who is the Vice President of the Committee for Health & Social Care - have said they would prefer new staff accommodation on the Duchess of Kent site or brownfield sites elsewhere rather than on agricultural land or in green fields.
Pictured: Deputy Steve Falla will lead the first requête submitted in the current States' term.
In his questions, Deputy Inder asked Deputy Brouard where staff who currently work from Duchess of Kent House could be moved if the site was approved for staff housing accommodation instead.
Deputy Brouard said that "staff delivering corporate services, such as finance and human resources, may move to other office accommodation in the States of Guernsey" and may work between home and office space.
But he added that there were "other requirements for this office space [Duchess of Kent] to enable other programmes such as the modernisation project".
Pictured: This key worker housing site at Ville au Roi was opened in 2020. The States have identified that there is more demand such accommodation.
Deputy Brouard could not be sure when his Committee would make a final decision about its preferred site for staff accommodation and pointed out that it was "the Policy & Resources Committee that has made a request to the Development & Planning Authority for guidance about whether the land on the Hospital campus may be released now for development".
He added that obtaining planning permission for any such development "could reasonably take around 18 months", although he would like to "drive this figure down once a decision to proceed is made".
When asked how many units his Committee was considering for an accommodation block, Deputy Brouard said that a high-level estimate was for "128 one-bed, self-contained units" but that figure was dependent on design and planning considerations.
He also anticipated that some units providing key worker accommodation in the private rental sector could be released back onto the market if new purpose-built accommodation was built.
The questions and replies are available in full HERE.
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