COVER STORY
DON’T LET THE RISKS SNOWBALL
Cutting corners on your winter maintenance is the most expensive decision an FM can make, says Brendan Aherne, Chief Operating Officer at OUTCO, as he explains why gambling on the weather is the riskiest bet of all.
When facilities managers are asked to trim budgets, outdoor winter maintenance can often come under scrutiny.
If the previous winter has been mild then it can
seem like an easy saving on paper. However, gambling on the weather is a risk that almost always backfires.
The cost of ‘doing just enough’ can be staggering. A slip on the ice can go far beyond a single claim and payout. Wider impacts can include lost productivity, reputational damage and higher insurance premiums. Individual FMs can be personally implicated – should investigations by insurers and courts determine reasonable precautions haven’t been taken. Ultimately, betting against the British winter is like rolling the dice at a casino: the house always wins - and facilities managers often have the most to lose.
To see how expensive this gamble can be, let’s provide a practical example. NB - this is fictionalised version based on a several real case studies in the retail sector. Let’s imagine a hypothetical shopping centre in the south of England called ‘Cold Bay Park’ that attracts around 16,000 visitors a day. In 2024 its managing agent was tasked with finding operational savings. Among the services targeted for possible cost savings was the annual winter maintenance contract. Worth around £18,000 a year, it provided proactive gritting, round-the-clock weather monitoring and auditable compliance records. Keen to make the numbers look healthier, management cut the contract and opt for a reactive approach: gritting would only be called in if forecast conditions demanded it. It seems like a sensible punt. But as seasoned gamblers know, luck has a way of running out.
20 | TOMORROW’S FM
Early in December, a sudden arctic blast shifts the mild, wet weather to bring icy conditions across much of the country. Even so, the weather in the south was forecast to be above freezing, so the team at Cold Bay Park decide that a gritting service wouldn’t be needed. However, the team doesn’t consider road surface temperature forecasts for their area. These indicate that at ground level things might get far colder. As a result, overnight the already wet car parks and access roads freeze over. Within hours of opening three customers slip badly enough to need hospital treatment. The car park is hurriedly closed. The supermarket at the park sees a 20% drop in footfall as shoppers find safer alternatives. The £18,000 gamble on a mild winter has already been lost.
Scrambling to recover, the FM calls in a contractor to grit the site. With no pre-agreed service level agreement, the response time is twelve hours. By the time gritters arrive, the damage is done: cancelled deliveries, furious tenants, and social media lights up with images of the ‘treacherous’ conditions. The local press writes of stranded shoppers and unsafe conditions.
In the following weeks, an injury claim makes the consequences even clearer. Without service records of the decision-making process there’s no evidence that ‘reasonable steps’ had been taken. A personal injury claim is eventually settled at a cost of around £45,000. Later, Cold Bay Park’s insurers hike annual premiums by tens of thousands for the next three years.
In our example, you can already see the financial hit of this gamble but there’s also reputational fallout. A video
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