How Councils Can Run Their Estate Efficiently Without Risking Non-Compliance

Introduction and Welcome

Mark: Hi everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar, and thank you for joining us. My name’s Mark Hamer, and I’m an account manager here at SFG20, and I’m responsible for supporting our council clients to ensure that you’re getting the most from your investment in SFG20. So just to let you know, it’s not too late to forward this to a member of your team or any colleagues who you think would benefit from the session.

And also we’d like to encourage all our participants to interact. So you can do this by taking part in our upcoming polls, which will come up on screen for you. And if you have any questions during the webinar, please put them into the Q&A tab and we’ll answer them at the Q&A section of the webinar.

So let’s jump right into why you are here: how councils can run their estates efficiently without risking non-compliance. So for those responsible for buildings, compliance is everything. Building safety negligence can result in serious consequences, including fines, reputational damage, and even prison time.

Should someone be injured or lose their life? A lot’s changing for councils right now and for many, the biggest issue on your hands is working with fragmented building data due to the government centralisation of councils. At SFG20, we understand your frustrations and want to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to help you keep your buildings safe and achieve compliance.

So let’s take a look at the four steps that you can start putting into action today. While the merging of councils is intended to reduce duplication and allow resources to be managed at a larger scale, this is a new way of working which is causing challenges. For some, the aggregation of data across buildings can result in the loss of granular detail about assets.

This can mean that you may be lacking up-to-date, complete records of assets that are under your control. What’s more, the merging of teams from different councils involves bringing together different working cultures, historic practices, and management styles, which can risk potential friction. More specifically, it can result in varying interpretations of national FM standards across regions.

This is creating a compliance and asset issue for some, especially when assets are not being consistently tagged or when effective change management processes have not been put into place. Mismatched records and incompatible systems can all lead to gaps in building information, resulting in uncertainty around knowing what is in your estate and what maintenance needs to be carried out.

A centralised team requires centralised building data, and this all starts with creating your asset register – or making sense of it if you already have one. Your asset register ensures that all of your assets are accounted for so that the appropriate maintenance can be scheduled, reducing the risk of unexpected failures and non-compliance. For buildings that fall within the scope of the Building Safety Act 2022, you should already have a golden thread of information in place, which must be held digitally. Your asset register is a great place to start.

If you don’t have an asset register for each of your buildings, you need to prioritise getting them in place. At SFG20, we work with many council clients and, also often, asset registers are out of date or lacking detailed information. It’ll come as no surprise when we tell you this can make defining a compliant maintenance plan complex and even impossible at times. We understand first-hand how widespread this problem is, which is why we’ve produced several guides to help you get your asset register in shape.

Ultimately, you need to know what you’ve got to maintain before you are ready to apply compliant maintenance to each asset. However, keeping up with all the relevant legislative and regulatory updates that affect your maintenance activities involves a considerable amount of time, money, and effort. So if you’re currently managing this gigantic task in-house, the great news is that you can outsource this task to SFG20 – the industry standard for building maintenance specification in the UK.

The best way to access and get maximum value from SFG20 is through our intelligent software solution, Facilities-iQ. This houses over 1,500 maintenance schedules covering all aspects of building management. All SFG20 schedules are created and monitored by our brilliant in-house technical author team.

They keep the SFG20 standard in line with current legislation, translating complex legislative information into actionable planned preventative maintenance schedules so that you don’t have to. With up to 700 updates to the standard per year, that’s a mammoth task, which is exactly why it’s a full-time job for our technical authors.

Using our AI-powered asset mapping tool, your assets can be automatically mapped to the appropriate SFG20 maintenance schedules. What used to be a long, two-year process has now been shortened down to a matter of clicks. In fact, one previous asset mapping project we worked on with a council took over a hundred hours, but with our AI tool, we could have reduced that down to just five hours.

By following SFG20’s pre-built, compliant, planned preventative maintenance tasks, you can easily understand what you’re legally required to maintain, as well as what tasks are critical for your organisation and sector, and which ones aren’t. By maintaining your assets in compliance with the law, you’re controlling your risk.

In Facilities-iQ, not only can you see the criticality code of each task, but you’ll also see how many tasks are involved, how long they take, and how often they need to be performed. SFG20 task frequencies help you to understand how often tasks need to be completed, to allow you to work out the likely costs when combined with hourly rates for contractors.

This ensures that your assets are neither under- nor over-maintained, which can result in cost savings. You can also save money by understanding which tasks are statutory and which are not, and this allows you to focus resource accordingly to keep your organisation safe and legal. You’ll also be able to see the required skill set for each task and work out if you already have a competent person on site, and can reduce the number of outsourced on-site visits and associated costs with this.

Your digital record of up-to-date information in your asset register is a key part of building out and maintaining the all-important golden thread. Within Facilities-iQ, you can integrate your maintenance strategy with your existing operational systems, such as CAFM and CMMS, and plan and carry out work – maintaining the digital thread of automatically updated information.

This allows you to further build out a key part of your golden thread, which contains all of the important information about your buildings, including what statutory maintenance tasks have been carried out, when, and by whom. All buildings should be treated as high risk and have a golden thread of information, regardless of whether your building falls under scope or not.

That way you’ll have a greater chance of achieving compliance. Paper-based forms of your asset register and golden threads simply aren’t good enough. They need to be digitised so that they’re traceable and easily accessible. By 2025, the Government Property Function has pledged to ensure that all buildings have an FM asset register compliant with the FMS 002 Asset Data Standard.

The standard provides the framework for creating accurate, up-to-date asset registers. SFG20’s maintenance task criticality codes are referenced within this standard to provide consistent criticality ratings to inform prioritisation of maintenance activities and support investment decisions.

This standard can be used in tandem with SFG20 to manage asset register data and include the correct criticality codes.

Without clear service level agreements, this can lead to difficulties during and after building handovers. A common consequence of this is the loss of building information. Not only is this inefficient, but it’s also a legal issue for buildings that fall within the scope of the Building Safety Act 2022.

To manage maintenance contracts effectively, it’s equally important to keep your asset registers up to date with accurate information. If not, this can cause a lack of clarity over assets, making drawing up precise, detailed specifications and works for a tender harder than it needs to be. Combined with a good knowledge of your building and its assets, SFG20 can help smooth contract negotiations by allowing you to draw up standardised specifications of work. This ensures that all contractors or service providers are quoting on the same work, meaning you can compare quotations on a like-for-like basis. And as everyone’s on the same page, this also reduces the chance of both contractual breaches and complexity further down the line.

You can also use the standard toward your service provider or contractor and ensure that works quoted are being carried out to what you originally specified. Building handovers don’t need to be complicated with SFG20. As long as an accurate asset register is provided, your specification of maintenance works can easily be shared with your chosen service provider for completion.

Then at the end of the contract, this information can be passed back so that you can run another tender. This process continues without the loss of building information, which is crucial for the golden thread of information. Without an active SFG20 licence, it’s not possible to comply with SFG20.

Because the standard is updated frequently – sometimes 700 times a year – this means that old SFG20 maintenance schedules are not legally defensible. To solve this issue, we created a member list as well as a digital badge to display your active SFG20 licence, to prove that you are capable of complying with the standard.

This helps you connect with other active licence holders when tendering or bidding on contracts with complete trust and transparency. Inaction costs lives. Each icon you see represents real-life examples of the cost of doing nothing and ultimately the consequences of non-compliance. These are all examples of negligence costing councils far more than carrying out the correct maintenance in the first place.

The Grenfell tragedy is unfortunately just one of the many instances of compliance gone wrong. At SFG20 – the industry standard for building maintenance specification – it’s our goal to empower you to confidently oversee building safety and compliance, no matter the challenge you’re up against. Thank you for listening.

Q&A Session

I’d now like to take this time to answer any questions that you may have. And if we don’t get round to answering your question today, don’t worry – we’ll respond to your query through the email that you used when you signed up for the webinar. We’ve got a few questions that have come through, so I’ll just work through some of these.

The first question: How does the Building Safety Act 2022 affect council property management? So the Building Safety Act 2022 requires buildings in scope – which includes many council-owned properties – to maintain a detailed digital golden thread of building information. Council FM teams need to ensure that they have traceable digital records of maintenance activities, and not just plans, as well as all the asset information, safety measures, and changes throughout the building lifecycle. All evidence needs to be maintained to demonstrate compliance in the case of audits or investigations. So your asset register needs to be updated regularly.

Just onto the next one. If different sites use different CAFM systems, how can FM teams maintain consistency in reporting and compliance? So you can unify asset and maintenance data by adopting a recognised standard, the likes of SFG20. And if possible, you should also try and consolidate your CAFM systems. In the interim, you could standardise reporting templates and compliance benchmarks to help reduce the discrepancies between sites and simplify the way you manage your assets.

And onto the next one. What practical steps can FM teams take when they inherit incomplete or outdated asset registers after a council has been merged? So FM teams should prioritise conducting thorough asset audits and rationalised data and asset tagging, and they need to convert legacy paper records into a digital format and standardise the descriptions and the maintenance history. This will help form a reliable foundation for statutory compliance and the day-to-day management of your assets.

And the next one: How can council FM teams secure additional maintenance budget? So, as a starting point, council FM teams can build business cases for extra funding by specifying the cost required for statutory tasks – which SFG20 can help you with. This is because you need to be able to identify the legal requirements and the risks, and this will help build your business case for key decision-makers to approve your case.

And I think that’s all the questions we have for now. If anything else comes through after the webinar, we’ll respond to that at the email address that you registered with. Also, if you’d like more practical steps on how to help your council estate run smoothly and efficiently and protect it from building safety risks, scan the QR code and we will send you an e-book today.

But other than that, thank you for taking the time to join us today. A recording of the webinar will be sent to all attendees, and please feel free to share the recording with anybody that you think would benefit. But for me, thanks again for joining and have a great day. Thank you.