PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
Alligators, swamps, and estates management
As the saying goes, ‘when you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp’. For NHS estates teams, that tension between firefighting and long-term planning is all too familiar. In this article, Paul Mercer, Stephen Wright, Suzanne MacCormick and Anisha Mayor explore how the Strategic Estates Management Advisory Platform (SEMAP) is helping professionals look beyond the day-to-day, tackling issues from PFI handbacks to digital transformation, and healthcare planning with a strategic lens.
As an estates professional, do you have a list of priority jobs and actions? So, arriving in the office on Monday morning with every intention of dealing with them in order, what happens? Stuff happens – and by the end of the day, the list is untouched, while plenty of other tasks have taken its place. Another question – Do you and your team/colleagues
have a clear ‘strapline’ that guides you every day? Something simple which opens into the aspirations for the long term? In every walk of life, there are only two types of tasks – maintenance and new work. In the NHS, the interminable waves of stuff that come at us are almost always maintenance or, more simply, firefighting. This scenario may be an oversimplification but is to be found in most organisations, not just healthcare.
Strategic goals can be hard to focus on when daily crises keep snapping at your heels.
Can SEMAP help? Simply put – yes! SEMAP stands for the Strategic Estates Management Advisory Platform – and note the word ‘strategic’, which defines what we do. Picking up the theme of this year’s Healthcare Estates conference, SEMAP is predominantly about prevention – with a little cure here and there. From the outset, SEMAP recognised that there is a lack
of practical everyday guidance for estates professionals looking to address strategic estates management issues.
Our response has been to establish a number of working groups, aiming to provide a source of helpful advice as well as asking some difficult questions about the strategic status quo. Outlined here is what SEMAP is currently progressing.
PFI – friend or foe? Many NHS bodies have been dealing with PFI for a couple of decades or more, and these contracts are coming to a close over the next few years, with the majority reaching expiry by 2035. How prepared is the NHS for the hand-back of these assets? There are a multitude of issues ranging from establishing condition, maintenance records, staffing, budget reallocation and many others. As per National Infrastructure Service Transformation
Authority (NISTA) PFI Centre of Excellence expiry guidance, Expiry Health Checks start seven years ahead of handback, yet it is never too early to start the handback process, and in particular ensuring that the concession the Trust or Board is about to inherit, is operationally compliant. For this reason, working with partners WSP and Citation, SEMAP developed a digitised PFI question set that enables Trusts and Boards to understand the condition of their PFI asset, and importantly, ensure that what they receive from their PFI Project Co. is actually an asset rather than a liability. The question set, which asks
NHS Trusts/Boards to RAG rate their compliance against key evaluation criteria, aligns with the categories required to set up a robust asset management system, and, taken a step further, could be developed into a system that complies with ISO 55000. Categories include: n Strategy and planning. n Asset management decision-making.
n Lifecycle delivery. n Organisation and people. n Risk and review.
We have been working with IHEEM members on messaging the question set to Trusts and Boards, underlining
38 Health Estate Journal October 2025
AdobeStock / Thiago
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