Protecting Council Buildings in a Changing Compliance Landscape

Sebastian Etchells: 

Hi everyone, and welcome and thank you for taking the time to join me today. My name's Seb Etchells and I'm part of the team here at SFG20. Just to let you know, before we get started, we like to encourage all of our participants to interact with our webinars. You can do this by taking part in some of our upcoming polls, which will come up on the right hand side of your screen.

If you have any questions at all during the webinar, please put them in the Q&A tab. Also find on the right hand side of your screen and we'll answer them in the Q&A section of this webinar. If we aren't able to answer your questions today, don't worry, we'll respond to them as to your queries via email and provided when you registered for this webinar.

So let's jump into the reason why you are here and how councils can run their estate efficiently without risking non-compliance. As the recognised UK industry standard for building maintenance specifications, SFG20 works closely with many councils across the country to support safe and effective management of their buildings.

It's through this work that we've developed a deep understanding of the unique complexities and challenges that they face. Before we move on to these challenges, practical steps on how to address them, I'd like to start by providing some background for those who may not have heard of SFG20 before, back in 1990, the Heating and Ventilation Contractors Association.

Decided that there was a need to introduce standards to their sector and to do so, the services and facilities group of the HVCA was created, and on the 20th publication, this was the standard of maintenance of heating and ventilation equipment that became SFG20 as the standard evolved from a book into A PDF, which was stored on a CD rom, the content was then published.

Onto the internet back in 2007, and that became the means of accessing content through the web. Then in 2012, SFG20 released its first application around its content that enabled people to start working with that content within their organisation through an online application. In 2024 SFG20 released Facilities-iQ, our intelligent software solution, and this was the first true digitalisation of the content bringing with it customisation that allows organisations to make the best use of SFG20 standard.

The SFG20 standard is exclusively accessed through Facilities-iQ, which is complete with over 1500 maintenance schedules for various asset types. SFG20's full team of technical authors create and upkeep the SFG20 standard in line with the current legislation regulation and standards translating complex legislation.

Information into our actionable maintenance schedules with up to 700 updates to the SFG20 standard per year. That's a mammoth task as I'm sure you can appreciate, which is exactly why it's a full-time job. For our technical authors, we provide automated update notifications and give you a side-by-side comparison of what's changed and allow you to implement these changes at a time that best suits you.

Facilities-iQ enables you to tailor the SFG20 standards to your needs to create maintenance regimes, which are a collection of all your building maintenance schedules in a file and folder format. These maintenance regimes can be seamlessly integrated with your FM systems, such as a CAFM system to ensure that any updates you accept then flow directly into operational workflows, minimising manual work and compliance risk.

Launched in 2025. Our latest AI powered software module SFG20 Mobiliser allows you to upload asset registers and identify the correct maintenance for your assets. An industry first solution, which can dramatically reduce mobilisation time of up to 95%. This software module can be used in conjunction with Facilities-iQ, now recognised as the industry standard for building maintenance specifications.

SFG20 is used and advocated by thousands of customers worldwide, supporting facilities managers, building owners, and FM contractors and consultants. SFG20 offers a comprehensive solution across three core areas, content. Software and professional services where we offer consultancy services. We are best known for our extensive library of expertly authored building maintenance schedules, which can be used to maintain all assets within a multitude of building types.

So what does A SFG20 maintenance schedule include? Each schedule is made up of multiple tasks, and each of those tasks has specific information inside of it. So we start with the asset type. Here you can see that this is a task, which is part of a schedule for fire alarms, voice alarm systems, or VAS system.

This particular type of asset also has a SFG20 code, and these codes are well-known within industry. All SFG20 maintenance tasks are colour coded according to their level of criticality, and this is determined by our technical authors and who research legislation and regulation and standards, again, and industry best practices.

So for example, if we look at the criticality of this particular task, it's been coded red, which means it's a statutory task. Every task within SFG20 Facilities-iQ will have a specific timing. This is an estimated tools-in-hand labour load for this task, and this is roughly how long this task will take to service.

We also have a competency element, which means who needs to do the work. Finally, on the right hand side, you'll see that there's a references tab, which contains all the links to legislation, regulation and standards that our technical authors have aligned this to.

Across the UK, councils are under immense pressure to improve their quality and responsiveness of building maintenance with legal risks on the line should your obligations not be met. As many estates date back to the 1950s and 1980s with chronic maintenance backlogs, many council owned buildings are in urgent need of repairs to their roofs, windows, heating and water systems.

However, due to budget constraints, this is leading to inefficient cycle of costly and potentially hazardous deferred maintenance. Budget constraints are forcing you to make difficult choices between maintaining existing buildings and investing in new ones. Meanwhile, recent legislation, for example, Awaab’s Law, as well as scandals surrounding unsafe cladding, a further increase in scrutiny requiring costly remediation and upgrades among already stretched resources.

Adding to these challenges is the government's devolution of councils, which is creating compliance and asset data issues for some, especially when assets are not being properly recorded in asset registers. All these issues are happening among staff and contractor shortages, meaning that you and your team may be taking on more work without enough resource in both money and manpower.

A lot is changing for councils right now and for many of the biggest issue on your hands is working with fragmented building data That is data that is missing or poor quality. For some, this has been made all the more difficult with the government centralisation of councils. The merging of councilors intended to reduce duplication and allow resources to be managed at a larger scale.

This is a new way of working and is causing some challenges. The combination of building data across different platforms can result in the loss of granular detail about assets, especially if this data has been recorded by different people. At different times. This can mean that you're lacking up-to-date and complete records of assets that are under your control.

What's more, the merging from different councils involves bringing together different working cultures, historic practices and management styles, which can potentially create friction. Specifically, it can result in varying interpretations of national FM standards across regions. Mismatch records and incompatible systems can all lead to gaps in building information, resulting in uncertainty around knowing what's in your estate and what maintenance tasks need to be carried out.

A strong foundation in addressing all of these issues is creating a fit or fixing your asset register. Working with complicated asset registers is a common challenge for many organisations. When you have an asset register that's filled with vague descriptions such as boiler or pump, this can make it incredibly difficult to identify and understand the specific maintenance tasks needed to carry out on that asset.

Ultimately, unorganized and inconsistent data in an asset register can lead to inefficiencies, increased risk and compliance challenges.

The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a fundamental shift in accountability. The act requires all buildings in scope, including many council owned properties, to maintain a detailed digital golden thread of building information. This is a digital auditable record of what maintenance was carried out by who and when.

Council FM teams need to ensure that they have a traceable digital record of maintenance activities, not just plans as well as asset information safety measures and changes throughout a building life cycle. Evidence must be maintained to demonstrate compliance in the case of audits or investigations.

And your asset register will need to be updated regularly for occupied higher risk residential buildings. In England, council landlord will be the an accountable person or an AP if they own. Or are responsible for repairing the common parts, and they will be the principal accountable person or a PAP if it's the only AP or the AP responsible for the structure and exterior.

The PAP must register the building with the building safety regulator. Maintain the golden thread, prepare and update the safety case report and resident engagement strategy. Operate mandatory occurrence reporting, and apply for building assessment certificates when directed by the regulator. Aps in the PAP must identify, assess, manage, and monitor fire and structural risks, and maintain evidence needed to demonstrate ongoing compliance.

Ensuring that asset data is consistently structured, complete, and digitally maintained in a single source of truth is paramount, not only for compliance, effective plan maintenance, and long-term cost savings, but also for the Golden thread. The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a fundamental shift in accountability.

This all starts with creating your asset register or making sense of it. This all starts with creating your asset register or making sense of it if you already have one. Asset registers ensure that your site specific equipment is logged, tagged, and managed on a central system.

This system allows for accurate maintenance procedures to be added individually according to the requirements of the asset. This means maintenance activities are carried out in line with the statutory requirements, reducing the risk of costly breakdowns. If you don't have an asset register for each of your buildings, you need to prioritise getting them in place.

We understand firsthand how widespread this problem is, which is why we've produced several guides to help you get your asset register in shape. If you'd like to receive these guides, let us know. Via the poll and the screen, you can select more than one option here. And this isn't mandatory. This is just if you would like some more information from us.

Option one: I would like to know how to create an asset register. Option two: I would like to know how to fix my asset register. If you're struggling with inaccurate and inconsistent data, it's also great to know that SFG20's Professional Services team can step in and help you improve the quality of that data held within your asset register.

FMS 002 is the UK's government facilities management asset data standard designed to improve the quality, consistency, and interoperability of asset data across the government estate. It sets a common language and structure for managing information on facilities management assets, covering aspects such as data structure, quality assurance, ownership systems, and usage.

While the standard isn't strictly mandatory for UK councils, IE local authorities, it's still considered best practice and councils are encouraged to adopt it. As part of this standard, it's setting out the framework for creating accurate and up-to-date asset registers. SFG20's maintenance tasks, criticality codes of reference within this standard to provide consistent criticality ratings to inform prioritization of maintenance activities and support investment decisions.

The standard can be used in tandem with SFG20 to manage asset registered data and helps ensure consistency, aligning maintenance activities to their relevant tag or, or code so that the correct procedure is carried out. Councils, including local authorities, strongly encouraged to adopt SFG20 as the industry best practice standard for achieving consistent, compliant and effective approach to building maintenance.

Once your asset register is in shape, your next task is to identify the correct maintenance for each of your assets. However, the process isn't easy. In fact, it's near impossible for some organisations. Why is that? Because it's manual time consuming and relies on human judgment a lot of the time, which can lead to it inaccuracies.

Using SFG20 Mobiliser, which is SFG20's AI powered asset mapping tool. You can quickly and accurately identify the correct maintenance schedule for your assets, saving up to 95% of your time compared to manually mapping. SFG20 Mobiliser can be used in conjunction with SFG20 software Solution Facilities-iQ.

What used to be a long and tedious process has now been dramatically shortened down. In fact, one previous manual asset mapping project we worked on with the council took over a hundred hours, but with our AI powered tool, this could be, could have been reduced down to just five hours. Even if your data quality is quite poor and stored in multiple places, SFG20 Mobiliser enables you to equip your asset register with the correct maintenance activities which are unique to your assets.

Once you've used SFG20 Mobiliser to upload your asset register and identify the maintenance for your assets. You'll have a bespoke maintenance regime at your fingertips within Facilities-iQ, and this reflects what's inside your buildings and how each asset should be maintained. Now, before we continue, we're just about to launch a quick poll again, so simply submit your responses and we'll be sure to get back to you.

You can select more than one option here. The three options are I want to request the bespoke demo of an SFG20 expert. I want to learn more about SFG20 and SFG20 Mobiliser and email me for information about SFG20 Mobiliser.

By following SFG20's prebuilt compliant maintenance schedules, you can easily understand what you are legally required to maintain as well as tasks which are critical for your organisation and sector. And therefore, ones that are all SFG20 maintenance schedules and Facilities-iQ are colour coded based off criticality to help you stay vigilant of statutory tasks.

Let's take a look at SFG20's criticality colour codes in more detail, red tasks are classified as statutory, which means they're a legal requirement. Amber tasks are classified as industry best practice, and they are not legally required, but can have serious impacts on your operation. If the asset were to fail for example.

Unexpected shutdowns or emergency repair works. And then finally, green tasks. These are classified as discretionary tasks, meaning they are non-critical maintenance. By maintaining your assets in compliance with the law, you can ultimately control your risk. I.

In May, 2024, Beza, IWFM, SSI and beria all agreed on the following definition of statutory. The term statutory denotes anything required by primary legislation such as act, acts of parliament, and secondary legislation such as statutory instruments, including regulations. When working to achieve statutory compliance, primary and secondary legislation often focuses on general outcomes rather than prescribing to specific activities, the specific activities required to meet statutory compliance may therefore be included in government guidance and approved codes of practice published by agencies such as the Health and Safety Executive, or the HSE and other standards such as BSI.

In the absence of a traceable reference to legislation, following industry standards and or guidance may assist in discharging duties under the statutory requirements. There may be more than one way of discharging duties to achieve statutory compliance. Remedial actions may need to be identified and completed apply.

A documented process will greatly assist in evidence in these decisions. As we talked about earlier, your digital record of up-to-date information in your asset register is a key part of building out and maintaining all the important golden thread within Facilities-iQ. You can integrate your maintenance regimes within your existing operational systems, such as a CAFM system, and create your maintenance plan and actually schedule the works, maintaining a digital thread of automatically updated information.

This allows you to further build out a key part of your golden thread and give you and will give you a greater chance of keeping your building compliant. Paper-based forms of your asset register and a golden thread simply aren't enough. They need to be digitalised so they are traceable, easily accessible and dynamic.

Let's move on to maintenance contracts and how exactly can manage them safely and effectively. Without a clear service level agreement, this can lead to difficulties during and after building handover. 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 of 2022.

To manage maintenance contracts effectively, it's equally as important to keep your asset registers up to date with accurate data as we mentioned earlier. If not, this causes a lack of clarity over assets, making drawing up precise, detailed specifications of works for a tender harder than it needs to be.

Combined with good knowledge of your buildings and its asset and, and your assets. SFG20 can help smooth out contract negotiation by allowing you to draw up a standardised, specific work specification. This ensures all contractors and service providers are quoting on the same work, meaning you can compare the quotations on a like-for-like basis.

As everyone is then on the same page. This also reduces the chance for both contractual breaches and complexity. Further down the line, you can also use the SFG20 standards to audit your service provider or contractor and ensure that work quoted are being carried out to the way you wanted it and specified.

Contract handovers don't need to be complicated with sfg. 20. As long as an accurate asset register is provided, your specification of maintenance and works can be sh easily shared with your chosen service provider for completion. Then at the end of the contract, this information can be passed back to you to run another tender.

This process then continues without the loss of the building information, which is crucial for the golden thread of information.

Council FM teams can build a strong case for extra maintenance budget funding by basing proposals on the amount required to carry out all statutory tasks. First, which disarms any questions by clearly laying out how much you need and justifying what you need it for. Making it a no brainer for extra money.

Few points are more powerful than highlighting the risk of legal non-compliance. To put it simply, it is very hard for a director or a chief finance officer or an executive board to say that they can't allocate you the money. This is because they will have the necessary information to make an informed decision, and they are taking the risk of breach of legislation, building your business case for an extra maintenance budget, or begins with understanding what maintenance tasks you need to be completing by law and reviewing them against what you've actually completed.

As referenced earlier, SFG20 prescribe what maintenance tasks are, statutory and non-statutory, and this will help you distinguish between maintenance you must do in line with latest legislation and what maintenance is not bound by the law. Therefore, you can focus your resources accordingly and even co uncover cost savings.

Each SFG20 task also details the required skillset, task timing, as well as frequency, which determines how often the asset should be maintained. All of this information will enable you to cost up maintenance work. Once you know your legally required tasks, you can use this skillset required to identify each daily rate, and then the task timings and frequencies to identify your annual budget requirements.

By prioritising your statutory maintenance tasks above non-statutory tasks, you can ensure that you are carrying out everything you need to do to achieve compliance. Then when budgets are cut, statutory maintenance need to be protected and prioritised, and stakeholders must understand the legal exposure of reducing compliance related activities.

These are all powerful messages that you'll want to convey in your business case. After you've calculated your maintenance budget requirement and determine the key benefits of securing additional, uh, maintenance budget, you'll, you'll be ready to write your business case. And when writing your business case, you may need to write a, uh oh, sorry.

Now you may need to write a business case before presenting one, although this can be, this can vary between organisations. Ultimately your business case, whether written or spoken, should open with the current problem in how you are currently managing your facilities, showcasing costs, and also compliance issues, or a wider disruption to business outlining issues and why your stakeholders should care is the best way to capture their attention right from the start.

Remember, your business case is about the people making the decision and how you can best convince them. Each icon you can 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 at SFG20, which the industry standard for building maintenance specifications is our goal.

To empower you to confidently oversee building safety and compliance. No ma matter. The challenges you're up against.

I'd now like to take the time to answer any questions you may have. Again, if we don't get round to answering your questions today, don't worry. We'll respond to you query via the email you've provided when you signed up for the webinar. So it looks like we've had a few questions come through. And the first question I can see is how does the Building Safety Act of 2022 affect council property management?

So the Building Safety Act of 2022 requires buildings in scope, including many council owned properties to maintain a digital golden thread of building information. So Council FM teams need to ensure that they have a traceable digital record of maintenance activities and not just plans as well as asset information safety measures.

And changes throughout the building lifecycle. Evidence must be maintained to demonstrate compliance in the case of audits or investigations. And so your asset register will need to be updated regularly.

Okay, so it looks like we've had another question. If different sites use different CAFM systems, how can FM teams maintain consistency in reporting and compliance? So I'd say although using one C system would be beneficial, it's not the end of the world if you are using more than one operating system.

You can approach consistency in reporting and compliance for a number of ways. Firstly, it's important to get your asset data into shape. In other words, you need to standardise your data, not the tools. Then you'll want to ensure that each of your systems are mapped to the SFG20 standard. Using our application programming interface or API, you can link the SFG20 maintenance schedules within Facilities-iQ to your existing FM software.

This way you can drive uniformity and centrally apply updates to all of your systems. You can govern quality by running a regular compliance check and tie supplier performance to it. Don't forget to centralise evidence, eg. Store certificates, photos, and other documents in a single repository with stable links referenced in records.

This is how you maintain your golden thread of information. Finally, you'll need to define the relevant KPIs for your estate and report the same KPIs everywhere. For example, for statutory PPM compliance or overdue tasks. So we've got time for one more question. Um, what practical steps can FM teams take when they inherit an incomplete or outdated asset?

Registers? After a council has been merged, FM teams should prioritise conducting a thorough asset order and rationalise asset tugging, converting legacy paper records to a digital format, as well as standardizing descriptions and maintenance history. This will help form a reliable foundation for statutory compliance on a day-to-day management of your assets.

It's also important to prioritise life safety and HRBs and log immediate risks and temporary controls for new assets captured. Make sure to derive schedules of and their frequencies from SFG20 and load into each CAFM system. From there, you can create a to address.

If you'd like more practical steps on how to help your council estate run smoothly and efficiently, all while protecting it from building safety risks. We have a range of fantastic resources available, including a full guide and checklist covering everything we've talked about today in more detail, as well as Awaab’s Law checklist facilities for your facilities managers.

If you're interested in downloading any of these resources, simply select these via the poll shown on your screen, and you can select more than one option here. There's, there's three options. I want to request the facilities management checklist for councils. I want to request the how to run an efficient counselor state to achieve compliance and maintain safety guide.

And finally, I want to request the Awaab’s Law checklist. I'd like to thank you again for your taking the time to join us today. A recording of this webinar will be sent to all of the audience members. Please do share this recording with anyone you think would benefit from it. Speak to you soon.