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The Government, not just local authorities, has lessons to learn on improving property management, because there lies the root of inefficient asset-management regimes at the local level, says Bob Baber Communities secretary, Eric Pickles, is urging public bodies to publish a list of their property assets, in the hope it will lead to a rationalisation of assets which will save billions of pounds for the public purse. Despite what we might think about the provocative way Mr Pickles presents the message, the underlying premise is sound. His argument is founded on a persuasive and independent body of evidence that savings can be made and better outcomes provided if public agencies collaborate to manage their property estates as a collective resource across local areas. Bob Baber: Mr Pickles' message is not just for local government, but also for the whole of the public sector.(Pic: Shutterstock.) The Audit Commission said as much over 10 years ago in its national study on public sector asset management, Hot Property, and criticised the lack of progress in its 2009 follow-up report, Room for improvement. Now Mr Pickles has home-grown evidence of the potential savings to the public purse following his department's work with 11 pathfinder areas. The pathfinders have been testing a holistic approach to managing public property as a collective resource across local areas through place-based asset management. This is in contrast to the prevailing approach in most areas, where public sector property is managed separately by different agencies, and in some cases, by individual departments within a single organisation. In all, the public sector in England owns property assets with an accounting value of £385bn. This is fifteen times more than Tesco's property assets. The open market value would be much higher. Mr Pickles estimates that if public bodies managed these assets collectively as one public estate, it could save the public sector £35bn over 10 years. What Mr Pickles does not mention is that this model of managing public assets would likely cut carbon emissions because of improved utilisation of the collective estate. Mr Pickles' message is not just for local government, but also for the whole of the public sector, including central government. Indeed, central government departments need to take heed, because here lays the root of some of the inefficient asset-management regimes at the local level. The fragmented capital funding streams and unconnected operating frameworks between government departments make it harder for the local public service providers to break away from the organisational, service and administrative boundaries which are meaningless to service-users. If central government departments were more joined-up on this, it would make it easier for local public bodies to collaborate locally on managing their assets to deliver savings and customer-focused services. For local public bodies to collaborate on managing their assets, they need to know what each other owns. Mr Pickles' appeal to public bodies to publish their list of assets is a first step towards this. A spin-off from putting this information in the public domain is that it also opens up the extent of land and property owned by public bodies to public scrutiny, and invites community engagement. It complements the Government's transparency agenda and the emerging community rights to bid for important community assets and the right to reclaim disused public land. Few public bodies will relish the prospect of dealing with challenges from the public on their property holdings, but those which have robust business cases that give good reasons for holding on to assets will be well placed to justify their rationale. Some public bodies, such as Northamptonshire CC, already publish a register of their property assets. However, publication of a list of holdings will be something new to many, but it should not be too onerous because public bodies are already required to keep a register of their assets for accounting purposes. Public bodies are likely to be cautious about publishing all the information on their asset register, such as how much each property is worth, because they may consider this to be commercially sensitive. Likewise, there will be sensitive properties that they will not publish, such as women's refuges. The Government has also published its demonstrator map of public assets as an example of how it would like to see public bodies publish their property holdings. Putting aside the gaps in the extent of coverage and issues with data quality, as a prototype, it does the job of demonstrating the potential from mapping public sector assets. Some areas are already creating this graphical representation of the combined public estate on a map to help them to spot opportunities for sharing assets and to reassess whether the current configuration of assets best meets the current and future demand for public services within local communities. For example, a group of public bodies in the West of England covering four unitary areas has already done this. In the case of Bristol City Council, it has gone further in also mapping assets used to support local communities which are not in their ownership. Hopefully, the Government's demonstrator map is a first step towards a national map of public assets. Much of the information needed to create it is already collected either by local bodies or by government agencies, such as the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey. Other national agencies including the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) already collect public asset data. What is not clear now is who is going to pick it up from here and turn the Government's demonstrator map into a functional national map of public assets. Already, CIPFA and Ordnance Survey have started to put their heads together to see what they can do to help make a national map of public assets a reality, without putting additional burdens on local public services. If they succeed, it will fill the gap in our national understanding of the extent of public land and buildings and, hopefully, lead to better-informed and joined-up decisions by central government and local bodies about our national stock of public assets. Mr Pickles' intervention is timely because the level of savings required in the public sector and the scarcity of capital to maintain what is already a poorly-maintained stock of buildings means that the piecemeal tinkering at the edges of the public estate is no longer a viable option. His promotion of a complete reconfiguration in the way public assets are managed, as one public estate, may result in fewer pubic buildings, but they will be better utilised and fit for purpose to deliver improved public services at less cost. There are still many cultural, political, administrative and capacity issues within the whole public sector which need to be resolved if one public estate is to become a reality, but this is a step in the right direction. Bob Baber is a senior property consultant at CIPFA Property and a specialist adviser to the public sector on place-based asset management.

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Hot properties

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