Talking to LocalGov, David Parrett, Director at Cadaema Consulting Services, argues that facilities management in local government needs a clear strategy – whether in-house or outsourced – and that getting there means confronting local politics, contract capacity and the ongoing battle over office space.
David Parrett, Director at Cadaema Consulting Services, has spent recent months setting out why local government's approach to facilities management (FM) has never quite matched the scale of the challenge. Councils in the UK occupy an estimated 56.4m square metres of space – more than double the NHS – yet FM has never been treated as the strategic discipline this scale demands. As the sector wrestles with tighter budgets, hybrid working and the fallout from local government reorganisation, the case for a clearer approach is becoming harder to ignore.
The starting point, Parrett argues, is deceptively simple: whether FM is delivered in-house or outsourced, it needs a defined strategy. Without one, nobody – not officers, not members, not residents – has a way of judging whether the service is succeeding. Too often, FM decisions are made reactively, driven by budget pressure or a failing contract, rather than by a clear sense of what the service is there to achieve. A strategy sets the benchmark. Without it, success becomes a matter of opinion rather than evidence.
The question of outsourcing is rarely just an operational one. As Parrett's earlier analysis of the sector makes clear, FM outsourcing in local government is shaped as much by politics as by economics. FM staff are frequently long-serving council employees, embedded in their communities and on relatively low pay grades. Any move to outsource risks union resistance and reputational damage, even where the commercial case is strong. That political sensitivity, combined with the sheer diversity of council assets – from Victorian town halls to leisure centres and temporary housing – means FM has never developed into the mature, standardised outsourcing market seen in other sectors.
But choosing to outsource is only half the challenge. The more pressing question, Parrett suggests, is whether councils are properly equipped to manage the contracts once they're signed. FM providers have commercial objectives and capacity that many local authorities simply cannot matchor don’t fully appreciate. Without the strategic and commercial capacity to hold providers to account, councils risk ending up on the back foot in relationships that are meant to be partnerships. This is precisely the gap Cadaema's Assure3C process is designed to close – offering councils an independent, structured framework to monitor contract performance, commercial position and social value over the life of a contract, rather than leaving providers to mark their own homework.
Sustainability, too, deserves a more precise role in FM thinking than it often gets. Parrett makes a deliberately unconventional point: FM strategies should not be built around net zero and sustainability as end goals. Sustainability should inform how services are delivered, not define what they are for. FM's core purpose remains supporting the effective delivery of an organisation's services – getting that right, efficiently and reliably, is what a strategy should ultimately be judged against.
Then there's the office itself. The pandemic reshaped expectations of workspace across the public sector, and the argument over how much time staff should spend in it shows no sign of settling. Recent reporting revealed that thousands of civil servants across government departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions, are not required to attend the office at all, reigniting debate over value for money and service delivery. For councils holding vast and ageing property portfolios, that unresolved tension over space and presence adds yet another variable to an already complex FM picture – one more reason a clear, deliberately-built strategy, rather than default habit, is what the sector now needs.
