16 October 2020 
Cheryl Pick, Projects and Engagement Manager
Our annual estates management report (EMR) work underpins the strategic decisions made in estates teams in universities across the country. It represents the hard facts and accurate data for big choices in estates management and future investment. By bench marking institutions against others, of similar size, or similar teaching/research bias, the report makes it clear that the performance of the overall university estate is as strong as it has ever been, and we should recognise and acknowledge the immense efforts of AUDE member teams across the country in delivering that.
Inevitably the Covid-19 public health emergency provides a challenging and unexpected context for this year’s report. The data used in this year’s analysis will be more useful than ever in benchmarking, as it marks the line between a pre-Covid and a post-Covid estates world; and more so perhaps because of the speed we’ve all been working at, the crisis accelerating change in an extraordinary way. The report clearly acknowledges the immense efforts of estates and facilities teams throughout the pandemic. Many universities are justly proud that they didn’t in fact close down during the height of the lockdown, but switched focus instead, to their roles within civic communities as active participants in finding local solutions, in supporting the NHS, and of course in many cases to the huge research task too. At a time when flexibility is demanded of us all, the value of a national dataset setting in stone the annual position for us to use in developing our own institutional estates strategies, is emphasised yet again.
