Guide to improving higher education performance through estates management

Date of the report

April 2017

Author of the report

Purpose of the report

Universities are facing more competition than ever before in the battle to attract students, staff and, crucially, funding. These pressures are forcing their estates to work much harder and budgets to stretch much further. LCMB’s work with a number of universities has shown them that Estates Managers are often expected to manage increasingly complex estate operations in laboratories and high tech facilities. At the same time, safety and compliance requirements are becoming ever more challenging.

Estates Managers are asked by their senior management teams to deliver these complex requirements with limited space and budget. Having carried out their own research, LCMB could not find a single guide that provides UK universities with a structured framework for approaching these pressures, so they decided to write one.

This guide will help universities to clearly understand which activities to focus on to make the most significant impact for your university.

What SWM likes

We commend LCMB for acting upon a clear gap in the market that recognises and deals with day to day pressure faced by University Estates Managers. Clearly, plenty of market research has gone into this piece of work and has been developed with the benefits for higher education institutes in mind.

We also like the clarity and format of the report; it’s not plain and dull, it’s functional and easy to follow, diagrammatic and challenging. It poses questions for Estates Managers to consider and there is plenty of focus on the financial impacts that their suggested measures can take, along with the environmental ones. It also recognises the various pillars of sustainability, including health and wellbeing and climate resilience.