NHS Auditor Saves NHS £2 Million Using SFG20

A former NHS Auditor spoke with us to elaborate on his experience with SFG20, shedding new light on how SFG20 can be used to hold maintenance contractors or service providers to account when drawing up contracts and be used to enforce contract penalties, allowing him to save the NHS more than £2 million! How’s that for ROI!  

The former Auditor also told us how SFG20 benefits him in his current role as a Compliance Manager and gives some bonus advice for building owners looking to draw up contracts with external FM or service providers. 

What problems were you facing prior to adopting SFG20? 

The Auditor told us that an NHS employer chose to outsource the management of Renal clinics to make a cost saving. They approached an NHS provider but the contract that was drawn up and signed was not clearly defined. 

“Not pointing any fingers or blaming anyone, but they didn’t approach the right people in the end” he explains. “I had to review the contract and what this provider was delivering and found we had massive gaps in PPM delivery.  

This brought me back to SFG20. Using your schedule library I was able to discover they were not delivering at least 60% of the statutory PPMs that should be delivered.” 

He went on to explain that this is a common problem in the maintenance world, whereby contracts are drawn up with vague or nebulous phrasing that leaves interpretation up to the contractor on what tasks they should actually be carrying out and when.  

This opens up the building owner to serious risks, because although the contractor carries out the work, owners hold ultimate responsibility in the case of an inspection or if anything were to go wrong.  

“The NHS is set in their ways with regards to tendering, and I have already raised concerns about how we tender, and who is involved in the tender process, because where I come from it used to be the commercial management who was involved in it, but of course in the NHS it turns out that procurement teams are involved in it. 

What I’m finding is the tender documents have our procurement policies written all over it whilst what we expect from the service provider or the contractor is thrown into a tiny appendix in the bottom. 

I know for a fact that the average contractor won’t read the whole contract, they are just going to be ticking boxes in order to win that contract.”  

How did SFG20 solve your problems? 

“So I used SFG20 to review the contract and submit an action plan to the commercial manager, I was able to say: "Right, you will need to contact the service provider to cost up the missing PPMs. It’s statutory and it has to be done, because our CEO has a legal duty of care to."

He rightly pointed out that SFG20 should be used in all contract agreements to clearly define maintenance responsibilities and mitigate risk effectively for all parties involved.   

“It gave us an idea of what services we are paying for and what the FM provider was not delivering. It helped in auditing and performance management. It allowed me to give them 5-figure contractual penalties every month, eventually saving us £2 million on an £11 million contract! 

It’s an age-old problem, building owners don’t spend the right money on the right people. They don’t check what their engineers are doing,  

Hard FM supervisors should be out checking engineers, but they don’t, so engineers get away with just ticking boxes instead of carrying out the tasks they are being paid to complete. 

I knew this was happening because I could see the reports, and some of the timescales they were saying tasks were being carried out in were very unrealistic. Jobs that should take 30 minutes according to an SFG20 maintenance schedule were done in 5, and when I would do random checks with an Engineering Manager they would have to admit that their guys didn’t do it.”  

What is the biggest benefit that SFG20 gives you in your current role? 

“It helps us to provide assurance to external bodies such as HSE, London Fire Brigade and so on and even local authorities as well that we are carrying out our statutory maintenance in accordance with the Health and Safety at Work Act. 

I also look at it as a quick practice tool as well, we are able to quickly prove that we are carrying out our maintenance. 

Where I think it benefits us a lot is that with the NHS there are a lot of older buildings, and it is a good practise guide to help us to keep our plant and equipment going, for when we are eventually able to find the funds to carry out a full refurbishment or replacement. It allows us to maximise the lifespan of our assets.  

It’s a good practice guide for us, the guidance helps us to keep our assets in good working order, allowing us to maximise the lifespan of our assets.  

SFG20 also helps us in mitigation. Let's say for example if we had a Legionella risk. Now where SFG20 comes into play is with things like your flushing regimes, temperature checks, you know, maintenance on your chlorifiers, clean chlorination of your cold-water storage tanks and of course bacterial sampling analysis as well, which is all mentioned in SFG20. 

That gives us the assurance to prove to our CEOs that our buildings are safe to stay open. If not, then I’m raising a risk on the risk register for that building to be shut down. And that's because they're not following SFG20.” 

What would you do if SFG20 didn’t exist? 

“Oh dear haha! Our lives would be more difficult and I will tell you why. When you look at a lot of our directors in FM, they don’t come from an engineering background. They lack the knowledge about the importance of maintenance, so they often just see maintenance as a cost pressure.  

Therefore, plant and equipment get maintained to the bare minimum standard, or maybe hardly even maintained at all.  

Part of a previous role used to also involve pre-occupation building surveys, I would carry out full surveys and find a building that has been built 15 years ago and the boiler hasn’t been serviced, or the cold-water storage tank hasn’t been cleaned or chlorinated. You find Facilities Manager that don’t understand how an emergency lighting system works for example, these are the things that I come across. 

It’s great having SFG20 to backup what I’m talking about, it keeps people quiet and stops them trying to fight me on things I can prove they don’t understand and aren’t doing correctly. 

I think it’s especially important for someone who’s a hard FM manager that’s new to the business and come from a different sector, SFG20 is a useful tool for them to hit that ground running and be able to perform.” 

Bonus Contract advice when hiring external maintenance providers 

“I noticed when performance managing FM providers in the past is that doing external maintenance on a reactive basis is an excuse for them to turn the job into a minor work or project and then to back charge a client.  

But then you know if the client is knowledgeable and if they had SFG20 in the contract, they could use that to their advantage and claim money back from the service provider.  

You could even introduce penalties for poor performance, clauses I’ve begun to introduce into contracts myself.”