Mark Ogier, its director of estates, said the SPU’s budget increases had been ‘marginal’ despite having to manage an £800m. estate that was becoming more costly and complex to maintain.
At last week’s Scrutiny Management Committee hearing, Mr Ogier revealed that approximately half of the SPU’s costs were staff-related, with 88% of those employees working in frontline roles such as hospital porters, caretakers, laundry workers and grounds staff.
£7m. was spent on utilities alone, although Mr Ogier said this figure was volatile and weather-dependent.
He said that cost pressures were high, and the unit was focusing on finding efficiencies.
‘If you look at inflation in the construction sector, for us trying to deliver a lot of our property maintenance jobs, they have gone up significantly in the past four or five years,’ he said.
‘On top of that, compliance areas such as health and safety have pushed the cost of those projects up.
‘In each and every area we’re facing bigger and bigger cost pressures, while we’re trying to at least stand still but also trying to deliver more.’
The reality, he said, was the estate was diverse and multi-faceted, so the SPU had to be skilled in lots of different areas to deliver the best solutions for each property.
‘Our budget is very constrained in terms of what we have to deliver for the size of the estate,’ Mr Ogier added.
Scrutiny president Andy Sloan questioned the rationale of having one centralised unit that was responsible for such a specialist and diverse range of buildings, and wondered how officials were expecting to achieve efficiencies going forward.
He said an internal audit had found savings originally forecast for 2023 had not been delivered.
Mr Ogier said, since the introduction of the SPU’s target operating model a few years ago, unit teams had become more consistent and specialist, improving compliance and the sharing of expertise across sites.
States chief operating officer Jason Moriarty added the transition to the model was delayed by more than a year due to the Covid pandemic, so the full benefits were still being realised.
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