Government must improve communication and organisation to make property savings

Government must improve communication and organisation to make property savings

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO)has said that the government is failing to realise the maximum returns possible from its office estate.

In June 2010 the Government Property Unit (GPU) was established to speed up the sales and efficiency improvements in the £1.8bn, five million square metre office estate, however the report says that departments are nearing the point where they have consolidated their own estates as much as they can individually.

The NAO says the GPU should work with all departments to improve data collection, validation and verification. The watchdog wants it to be much easier to make comparisons between what departments are spending overall and the cost of each building. Projects such as these have proved successful in the past – in 2005 the Highways Agency’s land managers, Smiths Gore, commissioned a comprehensive data processing service in order that the Highways Agency could meet their statutory obligations. They enlisted the assistance of a data service specialist to organise and perform data capture on the agency’s 8000 paper title documents for their land. This process also allowed them to identify a significant number of opportunities for potential future income or disposal in the form of sites outside the highway boundary.

Similar efficiency savings and potential income opportunities have been identified in many departments. Since 2004, government departments have cut the annual cost of the civil estate, which includes offices, laboratories and courts, by an estimated £800 million but further savings will require them to share space and use it more flexibly. The report blames poor planning and communication between the departments, as well as the weakness of the property market.

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