PLACE PILOTS Place Pilots – the West Midlands Combined Authority experience

Peter Beer Brian Thompson

When not enjoying the thrill of writing business cases for the alternative use of public sector HQs, Brian is to be found advising on a Place Pilot, preparing a regional OPE strategy for England’s largest programme area, working up an asset strategy for a ‘secret squirrel’ government agency, and researching shared property services across the public sector.  Peter was appointed Head of Property & Strategic Assets at West Midlands Combined Authority in June 2024. He is a chartered surveyor with 20 years’ experience managing local authority property portfolios for district and unitary authorities, before stepping into his current Combined Authority role. With experience in property transformation, asset rationalisation and asset strategy planning, he is now working with partners both at the regional level, and with Cabinet Office and LGA to promote good asset management planning and partnership working in the West Midlands, to unlock opportunities for property and place in the context of devolution.

On the back of much work in the arena of One Public Estate (OPE), Brian took up the challenge of programme manager for the Place Pilot programme in the West Midlands region (WMCA). As the article explains, this wasn’t just a case of applying OPE thinking on a wider scale, it was an opportunity to try out new ideas and prove wrong some who said ‘that will never work!’ 

With an open door to try something different, to be innovative and test out new dimensions to collaborative asset management, that’s exactly what we did. The Place Pilot programme was launched in 2022 and WMCA was one of five locations to be awarded funding, along with Hull, Sheffield, Derby and a tri-borough collective of Newham, Barking & Dagenham and Hackney. 

On the one hand, the scale of the West Midlands brought with it a complex web of public sector partners, only some of which would be immediate beneficiaries in terms of an allocation from the funding pot of £500,000. An upside of the broad portfolio of partners delivering services within the West Midlands, however, was the ability of the programme team to hand-pick projects to take forward from a large pool of ideas and direct approaches from partners for support. 

Wasn’t the Place Pilot programme just a re-brand of OPE? 

To be fair, there wasn’t total clarity in the minds of some on the distinction between the Place Pilot programme and business as usual OPE, a mindset enabled by the fact that the programme was run by the One Public Estate programme! 

When WMCA appointed an external programme manager to help identify and take forward relevant projects, it was necessary to remind ourselves of the core objectives of the programme. As hinted at in the opening paragraph, they are about: 

• A new approach to strategic property asset management 

• Using the programme as a test bed for scalable models of collaboration 

• Innovation and pushing the boundaries of collaborative property asset management 

• Place-based thinking (as opposed to highly localised projects in terms of impact) 

• Being clear about expected outputs and outcomes. 

That’s quite ambitious for a programme with a relatively short lifespan, originally set at 18 months! 

Nevertheless, the programme team remained true to Place Pilot ambitions and worked with partners and appointed consultants to identify, scope out, procure and take forward projects that would not normally appear on a roster of OPE projects. 

What did WMCA achieve? 

Figure 1: Partners for Wolverhampton Shared Property Strategy 

An unintended consequence of the programme was the creation of an infrastructure that has outlived the specific lifespan of the programme and will be sustained into the future. 

Space doesn’t permit a blow-by-blow account, but here are some highlights of the infrastructure put in place as a foundation for the identification of Place Pilot projects, and as a vehicle to sustain momentum and the collaborative ethos across the region: 

• An early programme of thematic workshops to fuel discussion on opportunities for collaboration across the region, and a ‘speed dating’ session to enable partners to get to know each other better 

• Creation of a Place Forum that brought together more than 30 partners, some of whom were very familiar with OPE and collaboration, whereas others were less experienced in this field 

• Raised awareness of regional priorities and how they can be supported through greater collaboration 

• Updating of key documents that talk to the practical methods of collaborating across the regional, and in a manner aligned to those regional priorities. One such document is the former Public Land Charter, now entitled ‘Our Estate’ and signed up to by all partners. 

Figure 2: The Updated Public Land Charter 

The projects supported in the region were diverse and, in some cases, genuinely novel in the world of collaborative asset management. They include: 

• A review of opportunities to use property assets imaginatively to support the implementation of new operating models – lead partner Solihull MBC 

• The preparation of a shared property strategy for a city bringing together 20 partners – lead partner City of Wolverhampton Council 

• Repurposing at rail and bus station assets to support place-making – lead partner Transport for West Midlands 

• Delivery of ICB’s Infrastructure Plan to bring together health sector stakeholders and local authorities – lead partner Birmingham & Solihull Integrated Care Board. 

We know that at least one of the above projects is scheduled to appear in the final evaluation report of the Place Pilot programme as a case study, with aspirations of being more widely adopted, not just elsewhere across the region but nationally. 

Was it worthwhile? 

Of course! There were some challenging times and lessons most definitely have been learned – but it is an evolving landscape. Perhaps one of the most dramatic change programmes that opens the door for a quantum leap in collaboration is the creation of new unitaries under LGR just around the corner – but that is a topic for much wider debate. 

If the question is posed to partners involved across the region, we believe the answer to the question would also be ‘yes’. 

From our perspective, the programme has: 

• Unlocked new ideas that would not have otherwise surfaced at all or with such pace 

• Brought people and organisations together that has already paid dividends e.g. specific partners collaborating now on the development of a site, space being shared, systems for making better use of space being more widely adopted, and even one partner delivering training to others on the adoption of EV 

• Delivered action plans for projects that set out a direction of travel with specific outputs and outcomes – it is over to the partners now to take over the wheel (and put petrol into the tank!) but the combined authority is also committed to do whatever it reasonably can to maintain the momentum. 

What lessons can be learned? 

It’s all too easy to say lessons will be learned, and then move on in ignorance and potentially make the same mistakes again. 

We started to capture from the very first sessions with partners – what worked well, what could have been improved, what more could have been done. Capturing lessons from each project was also embedded by specifying the preparation of a ‘Lessons Learned’ paper in all scopes of services. And the programme team kept its own log throughout the programme. 

Reflecting on the lessons below, there is a good argument that the recommendations should be taken forward for ALL collaborative projects: 

• Data – don’t get hung up on the detail when creating a strategy for collaboration. You need only target information that is sufficient and may well need to curb a natural instinct to capture, validate and analyse a myriad of datasets just because you can 

• Corporate commitment – there is nothing better than having your CEO and leadership team endorsing the project. We could easily distinguish projects along this dividing line 

• The right consultants – collaborative strategies require technical skills but are arguably more reliant on an ability to build bridges, spot commonalities, create a vision, and show empathy for the different circumstances of each partner 

• Encourage free thinking – lively discussions about the potential sharing of resources between partners, the definition of social value and how it can be delivered in practice, and the offer of one partner to provide training on EVs to others gives evidence that we weren’t bound by the language of bricks and mortar 

• Partner follow through – partners should agree, at an early stage of each project, how they will work together once any central pump priming funds have been spent. If the project is worthwhile, it is not unreasonable to expect partners to collaborate on the funding of a phase 2, detailed feasibility, business cases etc 

• Relationships and trust – the Place Pilot programme, in the words of an economist, created additionality on the back of new relationships and a climate where excellent ‘Trustpilot’ reviews would have been commonplace between partners. Things happened only by virtue of the programme, or the programme was as a minimum an accelerator. 

The quote below is one of many great legacies of the programme: 

“I am happy to confirm that we have now secured a small neighbourhood team site via the contact that you shared with us. It’s a great outcome for us and the local community.”