How to Secure Extra Maintenance Budget to Address the £15.9bn NHS Backlog

Les Bewick: Hello everybody. Welcome to today's webinar, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Les Bewick. I'm strategic sales manager and healthcare specialist for SFG20, the industry standard for building maintenance specification. 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 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 into the chat and the Q&A tab, also found 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 any of the questions today, don't worry, we'll respond to your query via the email you provided when you registered for the webinar. Let's jump into the reason why we're here today: to find out how we can secure additional maintenance budget to address the £15.9 billion NHS maintenance backlog.

So how did we get the £15.9 billion figure? The total annual cost of running the NHS estate is £14 billion, while the total cost of eradicating the backlog has ballooned to £15.9 billion. This means the cost of rectifying the backlog now exceeds the cost to run the NHS itself. The majority of backlog repairs are labelled as significant risk or high risk issues, and covers the remaining property that is in control or direct ownership of the NHS.

The backlog has been caused by severe funding constraints, which has resulted in trusts not having the resources to maintain their estate to the appropriate level, following PPM guidance. Put simply, there is a lack of detailed planning and budgeting, which is exacerbated by the lack of resource, but it's not your fault.

Patient safety is paramount, yet resource and skill gaps, FM recruitment challenges, as well as budget and funding constraints are all making your job harder and not easier. There's so much on your plate as an FM professional in the healthcare sector, but with the right tools and strategies, you can create solutions for your organisation and not more problems.

The impact of the NHS backlog is not to be taken lightly. Fines, legal sanctions, increased downtime and budget wastage are all reasons why the problems simply can't be ignored. According to the 2025 State of FM survey carried out by SFG20, budget constraints is the biggest challenge in the FM industry as a whole.

This problem is compounded with the ageing buildings that often require more regular maintenance. This correlates with reduced operational costs being the second priority for the industry, which was another finding from our survey. With such budget constraints, it's easy to see how the maintenance backlog in the healthcare sector has emerged.

So how can you justify securing additional maintenance budget? The answer is simple and by no means unrealistic. You need to put forward a convincing business case that stakeholders can't say no to. Often it can be difficult to convince stakeholders outside of FM of the importance of investment in software and carrying out planned maintenance.

However, when you tell stakeholders about the risk they face, the penny will drop and the answer will likely change. Producing a business case can be hard work and time intensive. We're going to take you through some immediately actionable steps that will help you reduce the time it would usually take to build one, potentially turning months and weeks into days or even hours.

Building a business case all starts with knowing for certain the right amount of maintenance tasks that have been identified and assigned to each asset, so the correct work can be costed and undertaken. Keeping up with all the relevant legislation 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 you can outsource this task to SFG20, the industry standard for building maintenance specification in the UK.

Our team of technical authors at SFG20 keep pace with the latest legislation, regulations, and standards, and translate them into actionable, ready-to-follow maintenance tasks, saving you time while supporting your compliance and making it easier for you to focus on your resource and budget. With up to 700 updates to the SFG20 standard per year, that's a mammoth task, which is exactly why it's a full-time job for our technical authors.

What you can see on screen now is an example of the SFG20 maintenance task taken from an SFG20 maintenance schedule in Facilities-iQ, our intelligent software solution. In our library, we have over 1,500 schedules covering multiple different assets, some commonly found in buildings, but also those more specialist, such as those found in healthcare facilities.

Each schedule has a number of tasks. In each task, you'll be able to see the asset type, code, criticality, task, timing, frequency, competency, actions, and compliance. Each task has a level of criticality, which allows you to see very clearly what you must do—i.e. those tasks that are statutory and required by law. We provide task timings, which are important to understand how much effort is required and the associated cost.

We also provide a task frequency to tell you how often it needs to be performed. We tell you the competency required—i.e. the skillset. Frequency and competencies aid with planning the completion of works. We also provide a whole set of actions. These are checklists of activities for engineers, so engineers can confirm they have completed them for compliance and contractual purposes.

Over on the right you can see the references to the specific legislation, regulation, British standards, and other standards that have been used.

To speed up the task of identifying the correct maintenance schedules for your assets, SFG20 has developed SFG20 Mobiliser, an AI-powered software module. What used to be a long, tedious process has now been dramatically shortened down from a few months to moments. Once you've uploaded your asset register, SFG20 Mobiliser works by matching each of your assets to the correct SFG20 maintenance schedule.

This process is automated, giving you back up to 95% of your time compared to doing this manually. Even if your data is poor or stored in multiple places, SFG20 Mobiliser allows you to equip your register with the correct maintenance activities, which are unique to your assets. If you are struggling with inaccurate or inconsistent data, our professional services team can step in and help you to improve the quality of the data held within your register.

Before we continue, we're just about to launch a quick poll. Simply submit your responses and we'll get back to you. You can choose more than one option in this poll. The options that we have available to you are: I would like to request a bespoke demo with an SFG20 expert; I want to learn more about SFG20 and SFG20 Mobiliser; or email me more information about SFG20 Mobiliser.

We'll leave that poll up on screen for about 30 seconds or so.

SFG20 Mobiliser can be used in conjunction with SFG20's software solution, Facilities-iQ, which is the home to over 1,500 maintenance schedules covering all aspects of building management. Facilities-iQ is the best way to access and get maximum value from SFG20. Once you've used SFG20 Mobiliser to upload your asset register and identify the correct maintenance for your assets, you'll have a bespoke maintenance regime at your fingertips in Facilities-iQ.

This reflects what is inside your building and how each asset needs to be maintained. You can use your application programming interface or API to easily integrate your maintenance regime into your operational systems, such as CAFM software, to create your maintenance plan and actually schedule the works.

With the asset register uploaded and mapped to the correct maintenance schedules, you'll be ready to evidence your maintenance costs. Each SFG20 maintenance schedule shows you the criticality code of each task, as well as how many tasks are involved, how long they take, and how often they need to be performed.

SFG20 task frequencies and timings help you understand the appropriate level of maintenance for an asset, ensuring you're neither under-maintained nor over-maintained, which can result in cost savings. They will also allow you to forecast cost for work. You can save money by understanding which tasks are statutory and which are not.

This allows resources to be focused accordingly to keep organisations safe and legal. You'll also be able to see the required skillset for each task and work out if you already have a competent person on site, as stated by the Health and Safety Executive. In general terms, a competent person is someone who has the necessary skills, experience, and knowledge to manage health and safety and carry out that particular task safely.

As some tasks can be performed in-house with minimal training, this means you can perform in-house batching—i.e. grouping certain maintenance tasks using in-house staff to reduce the number of outsourced on-site visits and associated costs. With less on-site visits come additional environmental benefits, namely reduced carbon emissions.

All of this information will allow you to build an accurate picture for cost and forecasting. In addition to the general planned preventative maintenance, it's essential to identify, isolate and understand the cost of compliance-driven tasks. These are tasks which will keep you on the right side of the law and are critical for building safety.

All SFG20 maintenance schedules in Facilities-iQ are colour-coded based on the criticality level to help you stay vigilant of statutory tasks. Let's take a look at the SFG20 criticality codes in more detail. Red tasks are classified as statutory, which means they are legal requirements. Amber tasks are classified as optimal, meaning they are functional, critical, and/or industry best practice, while green tasks are classified as discretionary, meaning they are non-critical maintenance.

You can use SFG20's task filtering tool in Facilities-iQ to select only statutory tasks. Once filtered, you can export this list into a spreadsheet or report. You'll need to ensure you include task reference descriptions, frequencies, and resource types for easier tracking.

You can also export this list into your CAFM or CMMS system. Few points are more powerful in highlighting the risk of legal non-compliance. By understanding which tasks are statutory and which are not, this allows resource to be focused accordingly to keep your building safe and compliant.

Don't forget to ensure that corrective tasks identified during PPM are logged as separate jobs, but linked to the originating task, as incorrect categorisation can skew your PPM costs. You need to ensure that your finance team has approved an appropriate set of cost codes so that data can be easily analysed and tracked.

Your next step is to review historical data spanning five to ten years to calculate an average annual reactive spend and align your reactive budget with risk expectations. It's important to note that budgeting for reactive work will depend on service expectations and available funding.

Once you've completed all those steps, you'll have all the relevant information you need to put together a convincing business case for the key stakeholders in your organisation. To do this, you need to step into the shoes of each stakeholder and emphasise the benefits of securing additional maintenance budget.

If you want to win the argument for extra funding, you'll need to begin by narrowing down your why—i.e. the advantages your organisation can expect, particularly those that are aligned to your strategic and financial objectives. Don't limit the benefits to stakeholders such as directors and CFOs.

You'll need to think about other teams such as IT too. The commonality of stakeholders sits in four areas, including reducing risks and achieving compliance, operational efficiency, saving money, and supporting the wider NHS strategy. To persuade your key stakeholders, you must address these concerns.

However, it could be helpful to think about what your stakeholders care about beyond maintenance. For the healthcare sector, patient safety will always be number one, so it's useful to think about how you can look at maintenance through this lens. For example, well-maintained healthcare facilities are far less likely to unexpectedly suffer from asset failure, which can result in operational downtime, cancelled patient operations and increased wait times.

Ultimately, your business case should open with the current problem and how you're currently managing your facilities, showcasing costs, any compliance issues, or wider disruption to the organisation. Outlining issues and why your stakeholders should care is the best way to capture their attention right from the start.

Now, all that's left to do is present your business case to the key stakeholders. It's important to remember your business case is not about you. It's about the people making the decision and how to best convince them. You'll need to clearly articulate what you're asking for based on your required statutory and non-statutory tasks, as well as why you need it.

For example, compliance, operational efficiency, patient safety, et cetera, and why stakeholders should care. There's plenty of other valid reasons why they should care about the case for securing additional budget. Ultimately, it'll allow your organisation to proactively address the backlog, alongside running your building more efficiently, reducing operational disruption, and saving money in the long run, which is how we approach the return on investment angle.

What's great to know is that many SFG20 customers quickly realise the time and cost savings add up to considerably more than the price of an SFG20 licence, rewarding you with significant return on investment in the long term. David Hemming, one of our clients who works with the NHS, told us how they used SFG20 to identify the work required to gain complete understanding of life-cycling costs.

Alongside using SFG20, they did a complete asset capture and condition survey so they could understand the state of their estate. From there, they were able to build a clearer picture and go to the director of finance and board and tell them exactly how much the estate needed to maintain. This resulted in £1 million of extra funding being secured.

David told us that they were able to look at the resource levels and work out how they could effectively and efficiently deliver those activities. He says that was an invaluable lesson: having the right tools and the right data.

The NHS maintenance backlog results in a loss of over 600 days or over 15,000 hours of clinical time due to infrastructure failures. On average, between 2019–20 and 2023–24, approximately 5,400 clinical service incidents occurred in the NHS every year due to property and infrastructure failures.

These infrastructure issues included crumbling roofs, water leaks, broken down lifts, as well as malfunctioning ventilation and heating systems, with the majority of the backlog repairs labelled as significant risk or high risk issues. With lives at stake, the cost of inaction is a high price to pay.

Think about it like this: one small maintenance miss could turn into a massive incident and you can end up in the legal spotlight. What you do today will lay the foundation for tomorrow, so don't put off securing additional maintenance budget. Each icon you can see represents real-life examples of the cost of doing nothing, and ultimately the consequences of non-compliance.

At SFG20, the industry standard for building maintenance specification, it's our goal to empower you to overcome the challenges of building safety and compliance, no matter the challenges you are up against.

I'd now like to bring in my colleague Emma, who's been fielding some of the questions as the webinar's been going on.

Emma Hall: Yeah, so we've had quite a few of the questions coming in. So one of the first ones is: how can estate teams prioritise when budgets are tight?

Les Bewick: Good question. I think adopting a risk-based approach is crucial. This means fixing high risk, high impact issues first, rather than 20 smaller issues, to prevent further spiralling costs—that's key. I think with SFG20, the task colours, the colour code tells you which ones are statutory, meaning legally required. By following the SFG20 standard, each built on the latest legislation, regulations and best practice, you can prioritise resources and avoid unnecessary tasks and prevent both under and over-maintaining, which can be equally as costly.

Hoping that answered that.

Emma Hall: Yeah. Another one: we've got, which frameworks support NHS trusts in improving estate management?

Les Bewick: So the Government Functional Standard GovS 004 sets out expectation for property management, while its continuous improvement assessment framework encourages better asset data, I suppose. Together with the SFG20 standard, these provide a strong foundation for compliance, planning and budget justification.

The Facilities Management Standard FMS 001: Management and Service is a UK Government standard that sets out the minimum requirements for managing and delivering FM across the public estate. The standard mentions the use of recognised industry standards and best practice, including SFG20, as a way to standardise FM management.

I think facilities managers and suppliers are expected to adopt FMS 001 and its companion, I think, Government Department Function FMS 002 as well, which is the Assets Data Standard, which provides a framework for creating accurate and up-to-date asset registers.

I think the Government Property Function or GPF said that they made a pledge to have all buildings have an FM asset register compliant with the FMS 002 standard. And I think obviously aligning that with SFG20's criticality codes provide consistent criticality ratings to inform prioritisation of maintenance activities and support investment decisions.

FMS 002 can also be used in tandem with SFG20 to manage asset register data and include the right current criticality code rating.

Hoping that conveyed.

Emma Hall: Okay, yeah. And then another one, which I suppose kind of affects everyone: how can we link maintenance investment directly to patients?

Les Bewick: I think poor estates mean cancelled operations and lost clinical hours. I think by framing maintenance as an enabler of safe, efficient care, you can make an investment a patient safety issue, not just a facilities issue. And I think we covered that a little bit just in the webinar earlier on, talking about how many clinical days and hours were lost.

Emma Hall: Yeah. We can do one more. So we've got: how can technology support tackling the backlog?

Les Bewick: I think again, we spoke about it in the webinar: AI-powered tools like SFG20 Mobiliser can cut the time to map asset registers to compliant maintenance tasks by up to 95%. The efficiency that it gives us frees up staff time, but also gives the estate leaders the data they need to justify the budget requests with evidence, which is a key thing.

Emma Hall: Yeah, I think that answers that.

Les Bewick: Perfect.

So securing additional maintenance budget is an important part of your plan in reducing the NHS maintenance backlog and making your facility as safe as it can be. With the right data and the right tools such as SFG20, the industry standard for building maintenance, you can get a clear understanding of what tasks you need to do, when they need doing, and the likely cost and the risk of not doing them.

If you'd like to learn more, simply send in your request via the poll on screen, or scan the QR code shown to request your complete eBook on how to use SFG20 to secure additional maintenance budget, which includes all of the steps we've talked about today. You can choose more than one option in the poll.

I'd like to thank you for your time to join us today. The recording of this webinar will be sent to all of our audience members. Please share this recording with anyone you think will benefit from it. Thanks now. Bye.