An insight into the biggest and most diverse property portfolio in the UK and probably Europe

After a 26-year career in retail estate management – finishing as director of estates at Boots – just over two years ago, I made the leap into public service and became the government chief property officer.

The title is something of a misnomer because, ultimately I don’t actually manage any property directly. Put simply, my job is about three things. I bring the individual departments and agencies who own or manage property together, ensuring we’re working towards one shared vision; I am the central point of coordination for all property decision-making, standards and policy; and I am the chief adviser to the UK government on all things related to property and the public estate.

It’s a challenging and endlessly fascinating role. Our estate in government is by far the biggest and most diverse property portfolio in the UK and probably in Europe. Prisons, schools, embassies, armed forces facilities, cutting edge science laboratories – they all come under our purview. In fact, less than 5% of our 140,000 individual buildings are actually the traditional ‘civil service office’.

About a year ago, we published our first ‘Government Property Strategy’, to shape the vision and steer the cross-government approach to optimising our built assets. The strategy is about using public property to improve places and support local economic growth; it’s about making our estate smaller, better and greener; and it’s about improving our skills and understanding of data.

As part of this work, we lead on the ‘Places for Growth’ programme, which is relocating thousands of civil service roles away from Central London and out into the regions. Almost three quarters (73%) of our original 2027 target has now been achieved. That’s more than 16,000 jobs added to the economies of places like Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham, York and others. Over 30% of all senior civil servant roles are also now located outside the capital. This is massive, fundamental change to where our workforce is located, bringing opportunities for new people, with new skills and different perspectives, to come in and build their careers in government.

This programme has been supported by our colleagues in the Government Property Agency, who continue to excel at creating new, multi-department hubs in cities throughout the UK. Our new-build hub in Peterborough is now open, 23 Stephenson Street in Birmingham is winning prestigious awards for the quality of the workplace experience and development is continuing in places like York, Darlington, Glasgow and other locations, which now have vibrant, productive, civil service communities that did not exist before our intervention.

We’re also working to create a smaller, better and greener public estate. Our theory is really quite simple. We consolidate public services into a smaller number of buildings. The buildings and land we genuinely no longer need are sold and we use the proceeds to reinvest to make the estate we keep better and more sustainable. Against a target of bringing capital receipts of £1.5bn to the government by 2025, we have already delivered £1.1bn. Two thirds of the target was delivered in the first year, in the most volatile and unpredictable property market any of us has seen for a long time.

I’ve picked out just a few things here to illustrate where we’ve had real, tangible success, but it’s equally clear we have significant challenges still to overcome. We need to do more to make our buildings more sustainable and we absolutely need to do more to tackle building condition and backlog maintenance across the estate – the RAAC issues from last year were a compelling example of that.

That’s one reason why partnerships are so important to us. It’s why we want to broaden and deepen our relationships with experts across the sector. One of the ways we’re doing this is partnering with the team behind UKREiiF. We’ve been involved since the start and we’ve seen it go from strength to strength, becoming comfortably the biggest and most impactful event in our industry.

This year, we will be based in the Transforming Government Property Pavilion. We’ve got an exciting programme of sessions lined up already, so please do pay us a visit and let’s discuss how we can work together to transform, modernise and optimise the public estate to drive growth and opportunity throughout the UK.