STRATEGIC ASSET MANAGEMENT Delivering place-based public services in an era of reform
 | Maddie is an Associate within Knight Frank’s Public Sector Advisory team, specialising in strategic asset management planning, portfolio reviews, and asset realisation consultancy. She works with local authorities, blue light organisations, and NHS trusts, advising clients on how to improve estate efficiency and maximise value realisation. With extensive experience advising on large-scale regeneration schemes, she also regularly draws on insight from across the wider Knight Frank network and external specialists, to help clients optimise outcomes and achieve best value. |
Maddie explores why strategic asset management has a key role in ensuring service delivery, operating models and estate strategies align for the benefit of communities, in a time of flux in public sector organisations. Success will fall to “the organisations that understand the role of place in service delivery, that use their assets strategically, and that remain focused on outcomes for the communities they serve.” |
Service delivery and organisational structures
As the public sector enters a new phase of reform, driven by devolution, local government reorganisation and greater regional decision-making, leaders face a critical challenge: ensuring that service delivery, operating models and estate strategy evolve together. While many of the policy themes are familiar, there is growing expectation that the pace and scale of change will accelerate in the coming years. This article explores why strategic asset management has a key role to play in maintaining that alignment and delivering better outcomes for communities.
Larger unitary authorities, more powerful strategic authorities and the potential relocation or delegation of decision-making away from Whitehall would represent far more than administrative reform. Together, these changes would reshape not only who makes decisions, but where decisions are made and how services are delivered.
For public sector leaders, however, there is a risk that organisational reform becomes the primary focus. Governance arrangements matter, but restructuring alone rarely delivers meaningful transformation. The more important challenge is ensuring public services are equipped to meet people’s needs more effectively, within a new operating landscape.
In our experience, successful transformation begins with service delivery.
Communities do not experience public services through organisational structures. Residents are unlikely to distinguish between local authorities, health organisations, policing bodies or regional agencies. Their expectation is simple: services are accessible, responsive, and joined up. As a result, the focus is increasingly shifting towards collaboration, integration, and place-based delivery models that extend beyond traditional institutional boundaries.
This creates an opportunity for organisations to step back and ask some fundamental questions. For example: What services are needed? How should they be delivered? Which activities are best delivered locally, regionally or digitally? Where can organisations work together to improve outcomes and reduce duplication?
The answers to these questions help define the operating model needed to support future service delivery. Only then does it become possible to determine the organisational structures, workforce arrangements, and supporting assets needed to make that model successful.
This distinction matters because periods of reform often create a temptation to focus on organisational design before service outcomes. Yet, changing governance arrangements without first considering how services need to operate, rarely achieves the desired transformation.
If service delivery models evolve, operating models must also evolve alongside them. And if operating models are changing, there is an equally important question to consider: do the estates that support today's public sector organisations remain fit for the future?
When operating models change, estate requirements follow
Public sector estates are often discussed through the lens of cost reduction. Rationalisation programmes, disposals, and footprint reductions frequently dominate the conversation. While these may be important outcomes, they should not be the starting point.
The real question is whether the estate supports the way the organisation now needs to operate.
Across the public sector, operating models continue to evolve. Larger authorities may be required to manage services across wider geographies. Strategic authorities and regional leaders are likely to assume greater responsibilities. Hybrid working has become an established reality. At the same time, many public services are increasingly delivered through integrated, community-based and partnership-led approaches.
As these changes take hold, property requirements inevitably shift.
Buildings that once functioned primarily as administrative centres may no longer perform the same role. Community locations can become increasingly important in maintaining local access to services, particularly where services are being consolidated or digitised. In many places, physical locations continue to provide reassurance, confidence, and visibility for communities even as service delivery models evolve.
Opportunities for co-location between public bodies may emerge, helping organisations deliver more joined-up services while making better use of public assets. Some properties may become strategically critical to emerging delivery models, while others become increasingly difficult to justify.
The most effective estate strategies recognise that property is not an objective in itself. Its purpose is to enable service delivery and, in many cases, act as a catalyst for transformation.
This means estate planning must be informed by future operating requirements rather than historical arrangements. Decisions about offices, operational facilities and community assets should support how organisations intend to work; not simply reflect how they have worked in the past.
This becomes particularly important during periods of reform. Asset decisions often carry implications lasting decades, while organisational structures and service models can evolve much more rapidly.
The challenge for leaders is therefore not simply determining which assets to retain or dispose of - it is understanding how to make informed estate decisions while future operating models continue to develop.
Addressing that challenge requires a more strategic approach, one that creates a clear and deliberate link between service delivery, operational requirements and long-term property decisions.
Strategic asset management as a leadership discipline
While the reforms present significant opportunities for public service transformation, they can introduce some uncertainty about the future. In this environment, strategic asset management becomes far more than an estates function: it becomes a leadership discipline.
Too often, strategic asset management is viewed narrowly as a programme of utilisation reviews, condition surveys or asset disposals. While each of these activities has an important role to play, they are outcomes of the process rather than the process itself.
At its core, strategic asset management is an ongoing framework that ensures property decisions remain aligned with organisational objectives and service outcomes. For leaders navigating a period of change, this requires continual consideration of several fundamental questions:
What services will be delivered in the future?
Where should those services be delivered?
What capacity and capability will be required?
Which assets support those requirements?
Which assets are becoming strategically important?
Which assets no longer align with future needs?
Where should investment be prioritised?
Collectively, these questions help organisations maintain alignment between their long-term objectives and the assets required to support them. The significance of these questions naturally increases throughout periods of structural change.
In a relatively stable environment, estate planning is often focused on optimisation and efficiency. In some cases, organisations can make assumptions about future demand, workforce requirements and service delivery models with a reasonable degree of confidence.
However, the environment emerging now is different.
As powers move to the regions, organisational boundaries evolve and new delivery models emerge, public sector leaders will increasingly need to make decisions before every aspect of the future model is known. Waiting for complete certainty is unlikely to be realistic. Equally, making major property decisions without a clear strategic framework introduces unnecessary risk.
Strategic asset management provides a way through that challenge. It enables organisations to make informed decisions today while retaining the flexibility to adapt as priorities, policy and operating models continue to evolve.
Importantly, it also helps organisations maintain a clear focus on outcomes. Rather than viewing estates as a separate function, strategic asset management creates a direct connection between places, services and communities. It ensures that decisions about property support the delivery of public services where they are needed most and in the way people increasingly expect to access them.
Looking beyond reform
The opportunities created by devolution and local government reform will ultimately depend on how effectively organisations redesign the way services are delivered.
While much of the current discussion understandably focuses on structures, governance and institutional change, the success of reform will ultimately be determined by something else: the ability to maintain alignment between service delivery, operating models and the assets that support them.
The organisations that navigate this period most successfully are unlikely to be those with the smallest estates or the most ambitious disposal programmes - they will be the organisations that understand the role of place in service delivery, that use their assets strategically, and that remain focused on outcomes for the communities they serve.
As public sector leaders prepare for potentially far-reaching political and structural change, the question is not simply what their organisations will look like in the future, but most importantly, whether the services they provide, the way they operate and the assets they occupy remain aligned in support of better outcomes for communities. Maintaining that alignment may prove to be one of the defining leadership challenges, and opportunities, of the next phase of public sector reform.
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