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The Government is planning to set aside £600,000 to undertake a "detailed and thorough condition survey" of all public properties, with an extra £3million to go towards property maintenance over the next four years.
The Government’s property portfolio comprises a total of nearly 900 properties on 867 sites with a combined value of around £900million.
It includes schools, emergency services properties, offices, leisure centres, listed site, cafés and more. Some parts of the portfolio, such as highways and land, are managed by other departments.
A recently published Annex to the proposed Government Plan - a document setting out spending over the next four years - outlines a one-off investment of £600,000 in 2023 which will "fund the employment of suitably qualified surveyors to undertake a detailed and thorough condition survey of all the Government’s properties".
The Annex describes the effective and efficient management of the Government's property estate as a "complex and diverse task" which involves activities ranging from "strategic planning for future uses to day-to-day maintenance". A "critical part" of this is to "identify and understand the condition of all the properties within the portfolio".
The last time a condition survey of the £900million property portfolio was undertaken was in 2008. The information from this survey is now described as "substantially outdated".
Pictured: The one-off investment of £600,000 will fund the employment of suitably qualified surveyors to undertake a detailed and thorough condition survey of the Government’s £900m worth of properties.
Meanwhile, an extra £3million has been set aside to increase the budget to support the ongoing inflationary increases of the cost to maintenance activities.
The Annex explains that a "range of ongoing maintenance activities are required across the different functions of the Infrastructure, Housing and Environment department to ensure ongoing and effective, safe, and compliant operations".
However, prices of these maintenance activities have been increasing since early 2021 and have now increased further as a result of "ongoing global macroeconomic events" which are creating high rates of inflation.
The "direct knock-on impact of this inflation is resulting in ever increasing costs for the procurement of both materials and resources" which are essential to maintenance operations.
It follows serious criticism of how the portfolio has been managed and maintained in the past from both the Government's official spending watchdog - the Comptroller and Auditor General - and the Public Accounts Committee.
In a report published around this time last year, the PAC concluded that poor management was wasting taxpayers' money and risked the loss of "culturally significant" buildings.
FOCUS: The £1bn property dilemma
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