Public assets and cross-service collaboration

The One Public Estate programme supports locally led partnerships of public sector bodies, helping cross-service collaboration around public service delivery strategies and repurposing underused or void public estate to make the most of existing assets.

Hull City Council and its partners used Strata to map all public sector assets in Hull and East Yorkshire, visualising the region’s estate, creating a single source of truth and helping stakeholders to work together much more closely.

Rationalising assets

The One Public Estate scheme had three priority themes: housing and regeneration, health and sustainability. The scheme aimed to deliver more integrated, customer-focused services (with property as an enabler), generate efficiencies through capital receipts and reduced running costs, and create economic growth. It also planned to reduce the public estate footprint by rationalising assets, co-locating services and disposing of surplus assets, therefore freeing up land for regeneration, and enhance service delivery, creating better outcomes for communities. Creating a greener public estate was also a key goal.

The scale of the challenge

Hull’s public estate is extensive, comprising thousands of assets with a footprint of over 159 million square metres, across schools, offices, civic buildings, car parks, hospitals, museums, prisons and community buildings, to name but a few.

There was the appetite for public sector partners to work together more closely, but there was no easy way to visualise the entire estate.

Visualising the estate

With multiple stakeholders involved – from local authorities and the Ministry of Defence to health, blue light and education organisations – it was vital that there was visibility of the entire public sector estate in order to allow decisions to be made.

Strata was chosen as the tool of choice for mapping the estate, as it had the capabilities to map the assets and overlay them with demographic factors. The Strata team was involved early in the project, and the team’s data experts were an integral part of the team in order to ensure the data gathering exercise and data analysis supported the aims of the project.

The results

Over 2,105 partner assets were mapped, all categorised as to whether they were core, flex or tail estate. Service impact could also be assessed, through overlaying the number of people within reach of each asset.

This enabled the visualisation of all assets, and the identification of opportunities for improving the city’s infrastructure.

The mapping project has led to seven new projects, including £2.5m of value from brownfield asset release, plus numerous blue light consolidation schemes creating efficiencies for the public sector estate.

"“Using the tool for our One Public Estate programme has catalysed major service transformation for the region, helping us integrate public services much more closely. It’s helped us get all our partners around the table and collaborating, and it’s really supported the disposal liaison process between public sector partners and expanded our project pipeline.” "

Gemma Aked, One Public Estate Manager, Hull City Council