360 PFI/PPP Working Group Meeting 05-11-2025

360 PFI/PPP WORKSTREAM MEETING 05-11-2025

GEORGE STEVENSON Just to build on what Nick’s been saying, Atkins are doing some very interesting things, not just as Atkins but they’re doing stuff in the industry around standardisation and taxonomy and things like that. So there’s a joint group that includes Uniclass. What they’re doing is they’re coming up with a methodology of aligning Uniclass, NRM and SFG20. So that’s something that we’re going to be involved with and if you’re interested in that sort of potentially geeky bit of making sure that everything glues together, drop ‘standardisation’ in the chat and we’ll include you in that. I know that some of you will have already done that and we’re building up a list of the people who are interested in standardisation.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE I’m with Pinnacle Group, my responsibility is not just new business but it’s mobilisation and managing handover of responsibilities with developers on large complex developments, for the best part leasehold residential. A bit of a challenging environment, lots of moving parts. Regulation 38 is a bit of a bone of contention for me, R38 means the development can be occupied whether it’s ready or not, so still very much a challenge for me. But handover is something that I’m working on at the minute in regards to what it is that I expect at handover when we talk about technical areas and what we as a company need to deliver back as evidence that we’ve taken receipt of a technical area.

And that’s not just the equipment, but that’s the room. Quite often the challenges are there’s the equipment but the room is not ready and compartmentation is an issue. And then you find that you’ve got the equipment, responsible for the equipment but you’ve got contractors in and out that room throughout the duration until it’s completed. So we’re putting checks and balances in place and I’m trying to create a bit of a structure, working with a couple of my colleagues and the developers, some are more leaning in than others at the moment, to kind of make handover of technical areas better. Sean Bennett did say that he’s very familiar with you, I speak with Sean regularly. It’s a challenge, I live in an environment where I’m expected to take what i get given.

If I challenge it I’m considered to be delaying something and holding up a process somewhere, but I want to say what process and where? What is it? Show me. So lots of different things on the boil at the minute, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere with it. And the change, whilst I have a passion for change, we have a passion for change, I can’t influence that change, that has to be a deliverable from the developer. They have to change and I want to say that they need to be on a call like this, if they’re not already somewhere else.

GEORGE STEVENSON Tomorrow we’ve got a BIM4Housing development group meeting. David Poat from Notting Hill Genesis chairs that, could we pull up who’s registered for that? If you want to come along to that meeting that might be a useful thing to do.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE Yeah, certainly, if you send an invite for that it would be helpful. I think we’re stricter in the HA department with, for example, Notting Hill Genesis for which we have a number of contracts with them, on the FM side it’s the kind of leasehold residential side where it’s very much open ended and a bit loose and the variables are ridiculous.

GEORGE STEVENSON I’m interested what you were saying about the Regulation 38 element of that. Did you say that you can occupy without having that sign-off?

ANDREW COULDRIDGE No, well, it’s issue and sign off which results in an NHBC acceptance. And the developer kind of sends it over. We’ve all got different objectives, that’s our challenge. I’m looking for compliance, a completeness around mobilisation. A developer is thinking I need people in because we need money in the bank, so how do we do that? If I’m a developer and someone says Regulation 38 equals occupation, then I’m just going to throw Regulation 38 at you, hopefully it sticks. I’m going to tell you that I need it confirmed this afternoon because I’m moving people in tomorrow. And that has happened.

And then weeks, months later on I realise that actually through deep diving into the R 38, everything that I’ve got, all of the O&Ms, realising that all the documents are dated as they were at the prelim stage. The technical area might say the equipment will be or should have and I want it to say it is and it does i.e. an as-built. I’ve had to challenge that and I’ve been told we’ll get as-builts over to you. It begs the question should you occupy it only when you’re providing me with as-builts as part of Regulation 38 and not what was originally planned? So, we’ve all got the same agenda, we want to satisfy our customer, our residents, our leaseholders, they pay my bill. And obviously developers want then in their apartments as quickly as possible because they can move on, particularly around year end.

So we’ve got a number of different factors and it’s a bit of a challenge. My question is will it get better? Hopefully it will, but it has to be led by the passion for the developer to want to make the process better.

GEORGE STEVENSON I’d just like to say that obviously this is billed as a PFI workshop, but the reason that we’re talking about this is that PFI has got exactly the same challenges as we’ve got in social housing. And in many ways because of the Building Safety Act and the work that has been going on in residential a lot of the things that have been done in residential that we’ve done in BIM4Housing are equally applicable to PFI. And I think there’s a really interesting combination here that in PFI you’ve got an extremely contractually tight regulated environment where if people don’t do what they’re supposed to do and create digital records the fines are substantial.

Now, that’s interesting, on the Building Safety Act side of things it’s now legislative. So, by bringing the two things together we’ve got both what is written in contracts and what is legislative. And what I think is very interesting is in both cases a lot of cases people are still not following it. So even though there’s huge penalties financially for FMs and SPVs in PFI projects, things still get left. Matt, Andrew Perry, Michael Harper, you’re all experts in PFI and I think you would agree that the recording of variations is done not adequately robustly. And the result is that’s why everybody at the moment is thinking quite heavily about PFI handback.

ANDREW PERRY I think it’s because the impact of handback, now that it is actually in people’s faces and some projects have now actually gone through handback, I think people are seeing the cost of getting records kicked in to an acceptable shape. They are now having quite an unpleasant touch of reality. I think in the past it has been the dichotomy of people not wanting to recognise that actually it’s not a cost, it’s value. But the value will only be realised and the value of your asset i.e. the project data in its entirety is an asset because there is a cost attached to not having it at the end of the day, at year 25 or whatever.

But the thing is because for some people it is so far in the future they don’t care. That bonus hangs on what they do this year or what they hope to do next year and that’s it, end. It's only until people actually are forced to put their hand on the hot metal and go oh, bloody hell, that’s hot, you didn’t tell me. And you can tell people and you can tell people, but if they don’t want to listen, don’t want to hear it because it is politically or personally unpalatable, or what they don’t want to hear because they know that give it 5 years they’ll be on to the next contract or retired or gone. They don’t care, they don’t want to care.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE I think that comes down to ownership of cost liability at that point.

ANDREW PERRY Yeah, it doesn’t crystallise, not unless something goes spectacularly wrong and you find yourself in special measures. And that’s when people start to run a microscope over everything to make sure that the contract is running as per the letter of the contract. And it’s only then when funders start to get interested because once a contract gets put into special measures there’s extra costs involved which the FM provider, who is usually at fault, has to pay. And oh dear, if I’d have spent the money on doing what we should have done we wouldn’t be incurring the cost that we are incurring now. If you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question.

GEORGE STEVENSON I hope everybody is in agreement that what we’re discussing here is of value. Because I think that getting everybody on the same page in terms of what the challenges are, if we can start to agree what those challenges are and the importance of them then whatever solutions we come up with can then reflect that. One of the things that’s interesting, I as Active Plan, we’ve been involved in PFIs for 20 odd years and initially largely on the delivery side. So producing room data sheets and layouts and all of that sort of stuff. And then about 10 years ago we were asked by a big FM contractor on a hospital to help them because they were under threat of a £1.3 million penalty for not keeping the O&Ms up to date.

ANDREW PERRY That’s if they were ever up to date when they got handed over.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s exactly the point Andrew. When we delved into it we found two things. One is that the O&Ms themselves were in a single 38 gig PDF file which it was therefore literally impossible for the FM to keep the information up to date because you couldn’t edit anything. So we put one of our programmers on it and he reverse engineered the whole thing and he put it in a database, so they could then replace drawings and things like that.

But when we then probed a bit further we found that historically when the FM took contracts over from the developer and the main contractors it was recognised that the O&M wasn’t fit for purpose, wasn’t complete. And the contractor didn’t really have the appetite or the mechanisms to go back to his supply chain and ask for that information.

ANDREW PERRY Probably because it would have meant you’d have to have paid them.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s very true. So what was agreed, which is quite shocking in my view, was that there would be a financial settlement with the FM. I think it was quite a substantial sum, a half or three-quarters of a million pounds. And the purpose of that was for the FM to then use that money to then retrospectively go and capture the information and update the O&Ms.

ANDREW PERRY It got scooped into someone’s profit loan.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s exactly what happened, that was taken as a profit in the first year and then there was therefore no money to keep it up to date. So 7 or 8 years later the team on the ground is then under the cosh all of the time to get all of this stuff sorted and they couldn’t get it sorted.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE You know I said earlier in my world I’ve got what I get given, accuracy or not i can’t confirm. And technical knowledge is one thing, but having receiving a Wetransfer doc, not quite hundreds of gigs but a large file transfer means that we’ve lost that single source of data straight away. And then I save it to Sharepoint and my colleague saves it to his technical Sharepoint and we’re all out the window, we’ve failed straight away. I do have access into what the developer uses which is Asite, but it doesn’t break it out into what is Golden Thread or building safety or anything specific, I have to know exactly what it is that I’m looking for.

But the idea that I need to know what are your deliverables as the developer what are you giving to me and how am I going to get it? That’s a good question. But I’d quite like to see Building Control to take some responsibility and say actually under Building Control we’ll verify the O&Ms to make sure that you’ve got a set of as-builts. And if we pass them then Building Control is satisfied that it’s good and proper and that’s the deliverable. Outside of that it’s very open ended. And i’ve got folders and files and Sharepoint systems coming out of my ears, with lots of information but very rarely does it say as-built.

If I ask a question and someone says, an example is CCTV and I’ve got schematic and a number of drawings, I’ve got to see the spec and I ask the question how many cameras should I have? A simple question, nobody can give me an answer. Because I can tell you how many I’ve counted and where they are, but how many should I have? In other words, I’ve got an as-planned and check it against an as-built. I’m going to be honest, there’s been situations where overnight 3 or 4 cameras have appeared, contractors signed off 8 0r 9 months ago. And there is another problem, who is signing it off? Is anyone checking?

Have you signed for something that you’ve checked and verified? Is it against spec? Or have you just signed a bit of paper on your desk and moved on to the next bit? So I just think that the whole thing is a mess. Whether that’s a PFI contract or otherwise. I work with private investors who purchase apartments, they come to me and want verification before they occupy, before they will even lay a penny down. And all roads lead back to the source and the source is the developer. The developer subcontracts to a principle M&E, the principle M&E subcontracts that on. Their contractor might then subcontract. The question is what have I got? Have I got what I’m supposed to have?

MATT WILKIE To add to that, what I find in the PFI side and PPP is when you get mixed tenants as well. So we’ve got a building that’s suddenly got 150 new maglock and door access systems that they suddenly say it’s yours, you need to replace it, but it never existed. And the bit you’ve got where CCTV is a good one as well because what happens is because a lot of facilities are medical or whatever they actually add additional monitors because there’s different reception desks, they add extra cameras for their areas and suddenly you own everything.

And it doesn’t sound a lot until you start doing the maths on, for example, the maglock systems just on one building was an extra £160,000 expected to get replacements and maintenance for free. Because it was always there, unless you can prove otherwise. So it is a massive problem because even when you’re looking at your service contracts a lot of the companies will carry on maintaining but may not highlight there is another additional 50 or whatever it is in the building because they’ve agreed to service contracts. I had this at a university where I was asking a basic question, can you tell me how many alarm systems you maintain? They wouldn’t respond because they didn’t actually know.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE The thing is it has a massive knock-on effect with your budgets. Suddenly you’re over budget and you’re asking why am I over budget? Well, because we’re doing more than we thought we were going to do. We quoted for X, but we’re doing Y, it’s a perfect storm.

MATT WILKIE Another one on the compliance piece. If you start adding the door access systems and it’s been done independently, who says that the fire doors are now compliant? Because you may not even know that they’ve done it. I’m not saying that local authorities are the most famous ones I have to deal with that do it, but you do find they add a ridiculous amount of equipment without any engagement at all.

GEORGE STEVENSON I’d just like for Yogesh and Michael to introduce themselves.

YOGESH LUHAR I’m an associate director with a WSP. We get involved with a lot of healthcare properties dealing with PFI handbacks and also now looking to get involved in PPP handbacks for the LIFT properties that operate primarily within the primary care sector. So my interest in all of this is actually quite interesting.

MICHAEL HARPER I’ve been with Equans as a lifecycle manager for a PFI contract over 8 schools in Knowsley for the past 7 months. Before that I did 3 1/2 o 4 years with AMI, very similar, PFI 8 schools in Bradford. Listening to what everyone has been saying I see O&Ms, is it correct for as-built and so on. The FM contractors is in an even stranger situation because I’m relying on RSPVs, especially since I’m new to this contract, to give us the information. And when I first started on our Sharepoint in general there was no O&Ms.

So obviously I panicked from my previous role where I knew everything, we were keeping up to date with the variations and the drawings were updated. We had a slightly bigger team, we could rely on an architect and so on. But I totally agree that the Golden Thread is so important. Currently I’ve got to keep the lifecycle plan going, but I do hear what you’re saying when people even make jokes, I’m not going to be here at the end of this contract, I’ll be somewhere else and it’s someone else’s problem. So, everything you’ve said I totally understand, it is being said industry wide.

RICHARD FREER Jiss, show the development people.

GEORGE STEVENSON These are the people that have signed up for tomorrow’s meeting. If you’re interested in that development group then you can put that in the chat. When Andrew was talking there about the handover information, that’s a great segue into the main purpose of this discussion and that’s the use of 360 photography. Because the 360 photography, and what Matt said about maglocks, the 360 photograph is a very simple way of capturing what was actually installed. Not what was supposed to be installed, but what was actually installed. And to some extent it addresses the challenges that we’ve got, that Pierre has done a huge amount of work on over the years, with BIM models not being adequately detailed.

Now, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t still be pushing to get the BIM models complete and as good as possible, but the practicality of it is that often there is no money to be able to get specialist subcontractors to put all of their information in the geometric model. Whereas if we’re using 360 photography, as long as we can add intelligence to those 360 photographs, which is the work that we’ve been doing, Sodexo have been doing it now for 4 years, it acts as a complimentary thing to the 3D model. And then you’ve got a mechanism then to navigate the O&Ms.

MATT WILKIE For me, it all does come back down to the data. The 360 images are a good starting point because I’m dealing with some handovers at the minute and one of the things that I’ve been doing myself is taking 360 images. Because it’s not just what was there and what should be there, it’s the interpretation of what it should look like on handback. So when somebody says you need a new AHU or a new boiler or you need this, being able to actually look at it without having to drive down there and look at it physically. Because you want the health desk reports, the service reports, is it failing, what the problems are.

Because arguing on BCIS, some clients will completely reject BCIS as just fantasy and they expect it to run forever. But you’ve got to have something that you can say look, your flue is non-compliant, you’re going to have to change the boiler. Maybe you go for two smaller units and you can actually work the plant room through the 360s. I do think there’s a bigger bit than just the documentation at a moment in time, but it gives you a great position for dilapidations as well. So you can actually say well, when we built this there used to be a wall there, where’s the wall gone? Just basic stuff which then adds up to who updates the drawings, who updated the fire strategy.

And it just grows legs which is an important bit because otherwise they’ll go no, no, nothing has changed. That goes back to when we’re talking about no. no, we didn’t add that, it’s always been there. So I think it is important that the data is put in a format that is useful for everybody, but also starting with your PSs and finding your Sharepoint empty, there’s two major problems there before you can get to the Golden Thread. Is where is all of the data and do you still have it? Now, I found myself even with Active Plan, one of the contracts I was dealing with we actually had BIM models and asset registers in Active Plan, yet the contract didn’t even know that it existed.

I think that was one of Wilmott Dixon’s where they’d provided everything but nobody’s ever used it, nobody knew where it was. And you’re thinking who dealt with the handover? And this ties in with Andrew’s thing when you’re told is it fit for purpose? And if you’ve got nothing saying this is as-built, this is exactly as-built, here is the 360 picture. The fridge is in the corner, yes, we have got a chiller unit. And this is all timestamped, dated, photographic evidence and there is the O&M, that’s the argument point because when you’re getting tenants going we need to occupy on Monday you’re going well, I can’t. I can’t sign it off because there is no evidence that it’s been done.

Because what you’re talking about is the equivalent of a snaggy walk-around and going is everything ready to open on Monday. Well, the answer is no because there’s no paperwork. But that gets into the bits that are hidden away which also goes back to 360, like your fire compartmentation. Doing the 360s as is going through different phases would allow evidential before the ceilings go in etc demonstrating that all the fire stopping has gone in. So all of the hidden stuff suddenly becomes on this day it was there, 100% it was there. It’s documented and the O&M states this is what the fire stopping method was, this is the materials etc. But a lot of that stuff is completely missing most of the time.

You’re lucky if you get a drawing going this is the containment area and nothing about what that actually is, nobody has ever looked at it. And everybody is going up on the ceiling and going right, let’s just pop a few tiles and see if there is actually anything there. And then you’re looking across and you can see all of the way to the end of the building because there is nothing at all in there. So the data is key to it but a lot of this starts with gap analysis because you’re taking on an existing contract or a new contract it’s the same, it started with a long list and going do we have this, do we have that?

It’s the same as when I used to do asset surveys. I started with a long, long list of every asset type and then I’d ask the clients to tick off the ones that they want because it’s to lock people in. Because later on they’ll come back and say things like we only want the main fire alarm panel, and then three weeks later oh, can we have all of the fire alarm panels. By that time you’ve already done half of the building and not documented them. We normally document them anyway, but just keep it for ourselves. But there’s a lot of stuff where people don’t understand the ownership responsibilities and what that actually means.

Why do you need to know that you’ve got 15 fire alarm systems in your building? If you ask a lot of people they may not be able to tell you. They’ll just say well, we just go to the main panel. It’s got a fault light on it, where is it faulty? Is it even in the building? You go to a university campus, people have 60 buildings connected to a master panel, so which one is faulty? But you don’t know which building has even got the fire alarm panels. So, it sounds crazy but this stuff goes on a lot because a lot of people will do a test at a localised level. So you’ll have the master panel, put that on and then go away and do the other building.

The problem is that when that building is on fire what tells the master panel which building is on fire? Because it’s going to be that main reception that’s going to have people in there at night that will actually have the security guards, whoever is monitoring, because they’re not in all of the other buildings. They need to know exactly where the fire is or where there is an assumed fire, rather than going I’ve got a fire alarm going off somewhere. And it sounds like quite basic, but it’s just to sort of show that even in a building that’s got 15 alarm systems, if you’ve got one that’s gone down what’s the impact on the others?

Do the other panels work so that it all stays as one system? Is it a fact that you can take an entire panel offline and the other ones will manage it? Or is it the case that you’ve lost an entire zone because there is no fire alarm panel in that area? So the data is important, but also what that data is and how it should be used. And this is why it’s important doing the data collection is to make sure that we understand what that data is when ti comes back. Because it’s OK when people go parent child, parent child, parent child, but it needs to then follow on from that to understand what each system really is.

So for example, if you list all of the AHUs it’s AHU 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but then you’ve got some systems with HEPA filters in it, their criticality should be higher than the others, so the maintenance is obviously going to be much higher than the others. But it’s separating those out which often it just ends up as an asset list, where criticality is often not taken into account. But I won’t go into much more detail than that because I could talk about that all day long. But the other side of that is also who owns it? Which is what we were talking about earlier. Because it’s not just when they add new things, but often in the contracts you’ll have different types, Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, type 4.

Which will explain who owns it, who maintains it and who is responsible for it. And a lot of the time you end up maintaining looking after tenant equipment because people don’t read the contract and they don’t separate them on their asset registers. So hand dryers bizarrely is a common one I find on healthcare because the FM provider SPV may not be responsible for the hand dryers. The same with things like fire extinguishers, it depends what the contract says. So you end up spending money in areas that’s not yours because there’s no Trust that I’ve come across in 30 years that’s said no, no, that’s mine, I’ll pay for that.

They will let you spend your money. They won’t clarify, even though they know that it’s their equipment. And the other side of that is hearsay when people don’t read the contracts. Because a lot of things gets interpreted as people change and you’ll suddenly go oh, that’s always been like that, that’s your responsibility. When in fact when you do your research you find out it’s a variation and it’s owned by NHS, it’s owned by a local authority or something else. One of the ones that’s quite good on that are things like ponds and wild forests and things that schools do, because they often aren’t ours. They are projects they do and then decide nobody wants to look after it anymore and it’s like oh no, it’s yours.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE Just picking up on a point that you raised earlier and again something that I mentioned about the deliverables. But you mentioned your handover process, I’d quite like if someone could give me an example of what your handover processes look like because i’m trying to build one and structure it, from a document perspective. I’ve created a number of templates and an expectation of what I believe it should be, but I’ll come back to that. Building assessment certificate, it’s what I get given that says the building is compliant. Now, I get that. I might argue that maybe it’s not, if I go up to the 20th floor walk along the landing and I can hear from the ceiling hatch that there’s a draft.

And it’s a loud sound, if you were to put a decibel level meter up there you’d get a decent reading on it. And I’m thinking where the hell is that noise coming from? And I was told it’s because someone in the flat has got a window open, probably. And I was saying but why am I hearing it in the hallway, it has to be a compartmentation breach. No, no, they’ve probably got a window open, the door’s passed. I said it’s not coming from around the door, it’s coming from the ceiling hatch. If there was smoke in it I’m guessing that instead of noise I would see smoke. And the building is fine, you’ve got a building assessment certificate.

My question, and again it puts a huge amount of responsibility backwards because I’m just a recipient, I’m a customer and I get what I get given, who am I to challenge it? But my question is do we or should we take a building assessment certificate as a good enough evidence that the O&Ms are correct, the Golden Thread is as it needs to be, occupation can take place because of R 38> And for me the answer is actually no because the building assessment certificate in my mind doesn’t cover that. So the question, what does a building assessment certificate cover?

GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s a really good question, I don’t know.

PIERRE VENTER Every one of these things is there is a clear problem of ownership. So Andrew, one of the issues behind this is that the building assessment certificate will have a duration. At some point it’s either going to be handed over or it’s got to be reviewed for compliance. And again, these are layers of what I’ll call the streams. And what happens is who issues it and what is the update? So if there were any things added or any things removed that actually should be available connected to that certificate. Because that one, the next one has what has changed, the gap analysis, the delta between that.

Now how it gets stored, that’s even more difficult because we don’t have a single CDE, and when I say single multiple sources, but a single source where all of these things are available. And I’m more than happy to have a chat to you about some of those workflows. And the part that I want everybody to understand, Dubai has a mandate on BIM and what it’s basically saying is the fire department on a big mall actually have the GIS coordinates for every single lift door, fire escape, booster connection etc within the mall. Which means that when the fire takes place the fire tender and the fire chief actually has a device that says that’s where it is.

And ultimately it will go into an AR headset, when the smoke level is down below the waist you’ll still be able to see a green light saying that’s where the door is for the lift and it’s available for operation. That kind of thing is at different levels, but it’s about ownership. And the data from the very beginning of the project to the handover, to the end use, including all of these different parties, the local authorities, the building control etc. And I think George and Matt, that’s going to be the part that’s really important to take this timeline or lifetime and actually put an event and who the parties are. Their names will change, but there is a role that’s got to be appointed.

And the handover must be absolutely clear because otherwise the Golden Thread, from day 1, is defunct. You just don’t have that cascade where the actual changes can go through when you end up like Grenfell, one single place where that’s where a change was made that had the impact over the rest of the building.

GEORGE STEVENSON You’ve explained that to me before and it’s excellent. I suppose the question I’ve got, because I’ve been on quite a few projects that have been BIM exemplars where the handover information has been reasonably complete is then it doesn’t get updated. So I’d be intrigued to know whether you’ve still got any contacts with the people that are actually operating. Because you did that several years ago, didn’t you?

PIERRE VENTER Three years ago now on the mall issue.

GEORGE STEVENSON It would be interesting to know how well that’s been adopted. I’m sure the people that are responsible for BIM there will have the perspective that it is being used, but it would be interesting to know from the people on the ground and the contractors that are carrying out the works whether they’re actually doing it the way it was designed.

PIERRE VENTER Certainly, so I’ll get in contact with a couple of the people that are there. I think it’s really important from a term that everybody is starting to use about the digital twin. And in terms of the modelling, essentially we want a building in which the geometry is correct. And Matt, what you were saying earlier is that you’ve got an object that’s in there and where does it type. The whole thing about the BIM process is that there are containers in every development: in a room, a space, the floor, the volumes the actual zones. All of those are containers. What we want is we want the data to be able to be linked to that it’s Block B on the campus.

So, from the fire system it says it’s Block B and that there is fundamental to the skeleton of the data. It just means the systems and everything are controlled by the zone that they fit in, the volume that they fit in. And that’s really important for all of the documentation because basically it’s like a bin, you can put all of the data connected to that. As many streams and as many versions and as many revisions, all of that can be done by database. But the spatial model is really important because eventually that from the photogrammetry becomes your digital twin.

GEORGE STEVENSON I would not challenge that, but just mention. I’m now part of a group called Start With Smart and it’s full of experts in BMS systems and sensors and digital twins and all of that sort of stuff. And what’s interesting about that group, and there’s probably 140 or so people that are from Honeywell and the like, and the geometric model doesn’t really figure too heavily in that. What they’re bothered about is having the locations of things, but not necessarily that being in 3D. And part of the reason for that is that in many cases things like building services are often better understood in schematic form.

So, I’m not saying at all that the geometric models aren’t important because they are, but I think what we as the BIM community have done, we’ve interpreted digital twins as being 3D. And in the majority of digital twins, like in Formula 1 who’ve been doing digital twins for about 30 years. It’s as you said earlier, it’s the data that’s important.

PIERRE VENTER The one issue about when I talk about the 3D model, it’s actually not that. From a communication point of view, from a visualisation and understanding point of view that geometry of the shelf (behind me), basically you can add the layer of photogrammetry, you can add the layers of data which give you the ability because I can see that’s a corner over there, I can click on it and I can get some information. But I do think that the important part is that the relevance of the data to something that visually I can see it. And this comes back, Andrew, in terms of how do you check something?

You want to actually be able to go in a room and say that’s OK, that’s OK and select that, that kind of tool. And there are tools out there that are starting to do that quite comfortably. But what it is that communication is across the board, from the contractor, the subcontractor. And probably this is just a quick comment on the subcontractors. One of the worst things right now is that we leave stuff over, the contractor leaves it to the subcontractor. The as-constructed rather than as-built information never comes back from the subcontractor, they don’t have the competence for it.

The Building Control and their officers appear not to have much digital savvy in terms of that. But it’s just generally that makes no sense, that handover has got to be a caste in stone system where it’s very clear. It has a checklist all of those there, here’s the gap, sort it out before we move on.

GEORGE STEVENSON And my view is that I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t take 360 photos.

PIERRE VENTER No you must, as many as you need.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE Cost would be my response to that. If I’m sat here with my colleagues from the developer it would be cost. They know that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s cost. Again different factors, everyone is coming at this from a different angle, but it all boils down to it’s the money. And we’re not talking ownership and responsibility, it’s all about the money and who’s going to pay for it. In my world at some point when freehold interest gets released by the developer, because they don’t want to be responsible because it’s a high-rise building and they are the principal accountable person.

They want to remove themselves from that, so it goes to what we call an RMC, kind of resident management companies, people living in the development, how is that transition going to happen? I’ve talked about it for about a year now, no one else is talking about it in my side because I don’t think that anyone wants to. But that’s a real worry, we talk about digital systems but I come back to the cost and the deliverables would be a key one for me. If we know what our deliverables are, I know what you are supposed to give to me under the process quality gateway. I know what to expect and if I’ve not got what you’ve told me that you’re going to give me then I’ll come back to you.

GEORGE STEVENSON Just to pick up on that because I think this is really important to understand. Pierre used the term photogrammetry. Now, photogrammetry is different as a technology from 360 photos. So, to do photogrammetry you actually do need a point cloud and that is an order of magnitude higher in terms of cost, you really need professionals to do that. I know you can but the cameras for 5 or 120 grand and go round and do it yourself, but I’m not sure that’s very wise as the outputs from that aren’t great. So then you’re bringing in somebody like Mutivista and that’s not cheap.

360 photos, you can get a £400 camera and you can do a tower block in a day. In fact that one that we experimented on with Riskbase down in one of your blocks, I think we did that in half a day. So, the cost of doing that is not huge, you’re probably looking at a grand. But the other thing is what can you use those 360s for? So, this is something that Matt and I have been looking at these last couple of weeks. One of the big challenges we’ve got at the moment is fire strategy plans. And there’s a lot of buildings that don’t have a current fire strategy plan. And part of the reason for that is that it’s actually quite difficult to get ahold of fire engineers now.

And even when you get them they are reluctant to be too explicit about an individual property. So we’ve got a workshop next Monday where we’ve got several fire engineers coming to that. And what we’re trying to do is come up with a much more standardised way of doing fire strategy plans using 360 photography. So, if we’ve got 360 photography that’s been created for a different purpose, for example the construction company has got it because they want to make sure that they know what was installed so they are protecting their own interests. They may have commissioned somebody like Openspace or Mutlivista or whoever to actually do that during the design and construction period.

Those 360 photos, as long as you get the agreement from the people that commissioned them originally, those are fantastic to reuse them for asset management. And also even if you don’t have that you can commission somebody to go and do one of your tower blocks for probably a grand and you end up with something that can be used for not just checking your Regulation 38 information to be able to see what’s actually been installed. But it could also be used to reduce the cost of producing fire strategies.

ANDREW COULDRIDGE I get all of that, you talk about the costs and we’re talking about retrospectively doing things. But at the handover and understanding the deliverables of handover, again it’s quite crucial. Because if I’m going to get that done do I pay for that? No, it comes out of the service charge money which leaseholders pay into. Is a leaseholder going to be happy for me to spend their money on an activity which should have been a deliverable by the developer? And I would argue that all day, yes it should be. The answer to their question would actually be no, it’s not fair. So, everything is taking me back to cost and deliverables. Whose cost and what is the deliverable?

So I get where you’re coming from, that’s great on a 20 or 30 year old retrospective building, the one you mentioned on the coast an ideal scenario for that one. But on a brand spanking new development I don’t see that as a cost for the management company or the agent, that has to be a deliverable from the developer.

GEORGE STEVENSON I agree, all I’m saying is that if we can communicate more effectively with the developer and say to them look, this isn’t going to cost you 20 grand, it’s going to cost say £1,000. And it means that your exposure is protected as well, so why not absorb that? So, I think it would be…easier for the developer. I was at PRPs annual soiree last night and I was talking to people like Higgins, for example, who are a bit like Hill and, to some extent, Pinnacle as well. You are developers as well as operators, aren’t you?

ANDREW COULDRIDGE Pinnacle aren’t developers, we are just management. We get what we get given.

GEORGE STEVENSON But the margins that the developers have got are absolutely very constrained at the moment. But they also recognise the risks that they’re running as well. So better information to do that would be useful.

PIERRE VENTER The one thing about the Golden Thread is that it’s a historical set of information. And exactly like you have on Sharepoint, AC or any of the CDEs is that you actually have an automatic versioning system. So each of these subsequent from the initial photographic capture, individual drawings etc, the incremental part is what the benefit is. Whoever does that, every single one builds on and is then comparative to the one that happened before it. And that’s so much sense because now you’ve got the whole life time and show me how the building changed, if you wish to do that kind of thing.

But it’s what I call the debits and credits. You do the job once, you’ve got the deliverable, you’ve put it in the bin for access. And every single party that needs to use it, whether it’s the contractor, the asset manager, the local council all have access to it. But what it means is that they then could pay a stipend to access it. It’s still got the owned and maintained and this probably would be the developer’s responsibility because at the end of the day that’s the object that they’re actually holding. They hold the CDE and when the time comes they would actually be asked to transfer it, like a 747, transfer the logbook of all of the data and it’s clear, goodbye, move on. That’s my principle that I would follow.

MATT WILKIE Just as an example, this is a 360 camera and tripod. The tripod goes to about 7 foot, it’s one of the folding ones. This is the expensive version of Theta, you can get a Theta for probably £300-400. But one of the things that I would look at from a development perspective is to just push it on the project management team and it just becomes a cost that they pay once. And then the equipment just stays with whoever. So if you’re using the same project management team over and over again on every project it becomes their ownership. And then when your contractors build it in as a cost or the camera equipment stays with the contract.

So every time they're doing a new refurbishment or a boiler change or something, they update the images. So the equipment doesn’t become a full time job, it just becomes a task within a project. And then there is data management beyond that which depends on the setup, but it could be something like Active Plan. Or it could be having room by room folders where the information for each room with each image. But there’s ways of keeping the cost right down if needed. Because I come across the same problem regularly, that’s why I buy my own equipment and just demonstrate how it could be used and then put business cases together to try and get people to move to actually funding it.

Because the time you’ll save long term, it pays for itself over time. Because the big problem is, especially when you’re dealing with facilities, is people don’t talk about money lost unless it’s something like a boiler has blown. Not how much did it cost if we’d actually done it properly, did the preventative correctly, are we changing things too early? There’s not enough work done on that side that actually says well, if we actually had better data we could do more than just in time and get it replacing just before it fails, which maximises the asset usage. So, we’re not wasting money on it and at the same time this is why we need better technology which the cost will be outweighed by the amount we will save by having better performance of assets.

GEORGE STEVENSON I’d just like to show you some of the things that we’ve been doing. We’ve got the people that have signed up to the Golden Thread Taskforce. Now, not all of these are 100% active but…(AUDIO CUTS OUT). I’ll have another go of what I was trying to cover with the 360s. We’ve got quite a big group of software companies agreeing to work collaboratively. You may recognise some of those names, there’s others that you may not. But a lot of them are, for example, inspection applications which are capturing the digital records. And what we’re trying to do here is use 360s with photographs in a way that hasn’t been used before. Mostly people are just using it for visuals. So what we’re doing is we’re plugging into the 360 photo, we’re bringing them into an asset library.

So therefore what we end up with is what we call smart 360s. Now what that means is they can be searchable so we can use that to make things findable in a 360 photo. And by doing that it means that a lot of the things that we also do, COBie data, technical submittals, O&Ms, they can all be connected to the 360 photos. So it means that tasks, for example, can be managed through that process. And we’ve made it so that we can work with low cost £400 cameras, or more expensive ones like Leica 360s which are probably 30 grand. And then you’ve got things like the NaVvis camera which is 50-60 thousand pounds.

So, it doesn’t really matter how the 360s are created, there’s just the most productive way of doing it. But we’ve also got relationships now with all of the major companies that are producing 360 photos. And one interesting one that’s new coming into that space is Viewpoint. Viewpoint have now got their own 360 solution, a bit like Openspace. So, those are being captured for construction purposes for quality checking purposes, so they can be used for different things. So here, for example, it may be that they’re being used for asset managers to capture what assets have actually been installed.

So what I’d like our group to be able to do is just think outside of the box of what sort of thing could you use 360s for. So, it may be that you’re using it to not so much capture asset information from scratch, which is a lot of what Sodexo are using it for is doing, but using it to validate to test to see if what was promised to be installed, can you actually see it. We’ve then got asset inspection or assessment, being able to do condition assessments. We’ve then got procurement. It would make it a lot easier for contractors that are bidding or surveyors that are bidding for work to be given an explicit set of assets that they’re supposed to be inspecting.

So procurement teams could use it to get more clarity in terms of what they’re asking. Certainly safety, building safety, fire safety, the 360 again could be used for that. So, this is not tied up to any particular software applications, it’s all back to process. Disabled access is one area. But the other thing that we’re doing on Monday on the integrated fire strategy and access strategy is picking up on what Matt was talking about earlier and that’s maglocks, for example. So, we’ve got Assa Abloy coming on to that workshop so that they can give their perspective on that.

And the irony is when we worked it through, the fire strategy plans are there to be able to ensure that people can get out of the building easily. And the access strategy is there to stop people from getting in the building. So, to some extent they can be conflicting priorities. And if we can bring those together into a coherent whole then we stand more of a chance of getting something right. So, I’d like you to think, we talked earlier about the security control systems. Another one is ventilation. Fire risk assessments, if the fire risk assessment has got 360 photography as ell then it just brings the whole thing to life.

It means that the fire risk assessment is probably going to be better anyway and it’s also a lot easier to implement things and check that they’ve been done. O&M information is always going to be built to find your way around, but if that’s all connected back to 360 photography then it’s a lot easier to find things if you can just click on the 360 photograph and it takes you to the page in the O&M that has got that particular information. Or a collection of documents that goes up to make up a system and the Golden Thread is obviously part of that whole process. So, I don’t know whether that is food for thought, has anybody got any comments or suggestions as to what’s missing from that?

PIERRE VENTER The contribution that i’d like to make here is that for each of those particular actions, like COBie, one of the things is to ensure that we follow the standards. One on the inside, the input, what’s a process and what’s on the output for each of those different things. Because the more standardised that they get made the better that it will work for the contractors, subcontractors, all of the different parties. Because they will know what they can depend on pushing out, which is the input, and what they’re going to get out at the end of that. Because that at the moment is one of the worst things in the entire industry is the fact that we’ve got different standards like that.

GEORGE STEVENSON I absolutely agree. but the other point, thinking about that, is that the 360 photo enables you to have maybe multiple standards against a thing depending on its context and what information you want to have against it. Because often standards, and certainly taxonomies, are designed to reflect purpose. So you may have a Uniclass reference against something and also an NRM classification against it and SFG and they’re all there for different purposes.

PIERRE VENTER Absolutely, George, So the ownership of the different forms of information is important, but what’s really important is what I call the lens, the Elton John’s lenses, is that what you see is just information that you need to see. And that’s really important that it gets packaged in what you’re going to see. So, if there is a gap it must actually say, in terms of your version there is a gap. But if the information is there available and you can then use it.

ANDREW PERRY It’s a great idea, everybody needs different things out of the same data for their own purposes. And that’s why consistency and structure and links between the two are important. Now, in a lot of public sector contracts for making a great play of the FMS 2000. And being able to link Uniclass so you can take information from construction cost plans, flip it around and put it into a maintenance of an SFG20 format and you can do the same backwards. So everybody can get the outputs that they need from the same information so long as it is held and maintained in a sustained, consistent structured format.

And i think that is the absolute key to it. We talk about data lakes, everybody needs something different out of the same data lake: insights, cost. And when we move into strategic asset management planning to look at do we demolish, to we refurb, remodel, how much has it cost us to do something like this in the past, it’s of vital importance. And then of course we have got the Golden Thread of compliance and assurance running through it as well. And I’m part of the CIBSE working group, we are looking at digital led maintenance and of course data is the absolute key to it from the off. So, as long as you can assure the data and the quality of the data and make sure that things are linked, people should be able to get what they need out of the same data.

PIERRE VENTER Andrew, I think the important part is ownership again. Because if you’re looking after the NRM data, that’s fine. If you’re doing GS2 data, whoever has been appointed that must be the identifier. And at some point when you need to change or you drop dead tragically, it can be handed over.

GEORGE STEVENSON My question is if you look at the ones in maroon on the right hand side of the screen, in some ways what those are is a perspective on what information that you need for a particular purpose. Those are purposes, I would say. And if we can work together to say right, what do we actually need in terms of information for let’s say a fire risk assessment. And how can 360 photography, for example, connected to for example schematics and compartmentation drawings and things like that, how can that help the production of a fire risk assessment?

So, what I’d like people to do is to look at this from a point of view of what information would you actually want out of the data set that is being collected? However it’s being collected. Clearly classification, taxonomy and things like that are critical. But that’s only critical if it’s actually being used. We need to identify what those uses are. And if we can do that, what we’re trying to do within the Taskforce is identify AI agents that can go and look through to see if, for example, Regulation 38 information is actually adequate. It may not be perfect, but let’s just see if we have got a simple plan, for example, with the safety critical assets on them. And does it all link back to schedules and whatever documentation is needed.

That can be a simple agent, or probably half a dozen agents, that are looking at the same information for the same purpose. And I think if we can do that it then starts to bring us into a situation where senior directors in companies can actually become engaged. Because it’s fair to say that a lot of the stuff that we talk about goes way over the heads of people and they don’t see the relevance to them. But we need to tie it back to something that is relevant, which is probably money, it’s probably the threat of delays and it’s probably the threat of potential statutory or criminal prosecution. I think rather than just keep threatening that, we need to come up with some simple ways that we can say wow. It's like ChatGPT, you use that and it’s quite astonishing what’s being achieved with it.

Over the last month or so we started using a tool that Google have developed called Google Notebook. And it will take this discussion that’s 90 minutes and it will produce a 10-15 minute podcast and it’s absolutely amazing what that does. It's not perfect, but it’s very, very good at summarising. So, is anybody up for getting involved in looking at these types of use cases and these types of examples? Should we have a workshop dedicated to that in a couple of weeks time? Put something into the chat if you want to get involved in ‘agents’.

PIERRE VENTER George, I will share with you and then you can distribute it further this thing that I was looking at, the streams, the discussions that I’ve had right now. But it’s on a graphic, so it will be something that can start connecting some dots. So like the COBie there what goes in, what comes out. The detail, some of those things that you spoke about, the schemas etc. Those are already set, we just need to make sure that they refer to there and whoever picks that up and carries it, they start running that.

MATT WILKIE I think in the next meeting it may be worth us talking a bit more on the handbacks as well. Because we didn’t much today, but I know with the hundreds of contracts coming back it’s going to be a constant theme. But the other side of that being is anybody who has had any experience on the handback because I’m going through a few at the moment myself and the business is going through a few more. But it would be interesting to see if anybody from different companies, different perspectives, just to see how everybody is getting on with the handbacks, what problems they’re facing and how they’re dealing with them.

GEORGE STEVENSON Absolutely, and that’s an interesting point. What we’ve recently launched is an updated version of the BIM4Housing black box. The purpose of that is to be able to make it easy for people to come up with things that they’ve come across that it would be useful to be able to report back that are problems. But anonymously so they can report back. The Regulator, there is no mechanism for say you or me to report to the Regulator something that we’ve seen that looks dodgy, or that could impact on building safety, there’s no mechanisms to do that.

The only people that can report things to the Regulator are the principal accountable persons or residents, which seems to be a bit of a gap to us. So we’ve created this and we’re establishing a relationship with Cross who do the safety reporting, to be able to feed to them things that probably need pressing. So, I think, Matt, we can pick up on that as well when we have the next meeting.

JUSTIN GILLARD Is it worth me showing a bit of background based on something that Pierre said earlier with the principal contractor being listed as the person responsible for handover. (shares spreadsheet on screen). Column R here on the right hand side. The reason that I’m showing this is a part of the discussion that’s been fascinating today, certainly the concept of handback. What you’re seeing here is a standard document from quote ‘the largest commercial property developer and investment company in the UK’.

So, as a standard document you can see that RIBA Stage 6 handover, by default they list principal contractor as the responsible party for delivering the asset information for these assets. And what’s been placed over the top of that by meetings with the project team is the actual subcontractor that’s taken the place of principle contractor. It was really Andrew earlier that was explaining that he’s at the end and I was going to show this and say well, this is my scenario what leads up to what he gets.

This is the system that I’m involved in and I’m given to deliver upon. I deliver upon this, that was my reason for showing it and to confirm as Pierre says principal contractor is who this particular company see as the responsible party until I supplant principal contractor.

GEORGE STEVENSON With that, are you saying Justin that that’s a solid way of doing it? Or have you got some question marks on it?

JUSTIN GILLARD I think where I was going with that is responsibility. So, as Pierre was commenting about packaging things up and responsibility and somebody has to be tasked with it. The responsibility has been by default set as principal contractor in that scenario and then it has been changed from principal contractor by me and my client, who is doing the fit out in this case, to the actual subcontractor as being the responsible party. I think that’s the relevance of showing it. And giving some context and background as to how we end up in this scenario which was covered in this meeting which was fascinating to me.

PIERRE VENTER Justin, if I could just add in there something. The original BIM management documents would then be applicable to the subcontractor. In other words, what you’re going to get was originally what was defined at the beginning to be delivered at the end. And that consistency comes back to making sure that they have to be competent and capable to do that as a subcontractor, which is very difficult depending on the size of that particular company. And the perception of the cost. Again, something that needs to be considered at the beginning before you actually kick off.

JUSTIN GILLARD Absolutely, and in this particular scenario I am the person leading the information deliverable, but I am on another project where I’m subordinate to an information management company and they’ve got a whole team of people doing this. Because the subcontractor list is really long, it’s about 20 subcontractors, and I can see where there’s a team of them handling it. And also I had an idea, because I develop my own website, for capturing when I get people onboard, like an onboarding concept. Is that in some ways as an information manager I’m like the pilot of a plane.

if you imagine all of the seats on the plane are subcontractors and they’ve all got a ticket to be on there and they’ve all got something to do before they can get off of the airplane. And I’m kind of flying the aeroplane and I’ve got to bring it in to land at handover. I’ve never thought of it that way until this meeting.

PIERRE VENTER An interesting one is that you’ve got some people in first class, some in business, some in cattle class and somebody at the back in the loo. So it just depends on who’s in what shirt.

JUSTIN GILLARD It was just an idea that came to me because the reason that I thought of it is because I have to bring this stuff in to land as the information manager. There’s people getting away with not delivering, so I thought if you hold these people captive in some way, contractually or otherwise, you get my thinking.

GEORGE STEVENSON In terms of the next session, what do we want to cover, Matt?

MATT WILKIE I think we do a bit on the handback as well, just see if we can structure something around that. I’ll see if I can put some bullet points and stuff for going over out in advance to see if anybody is interested in feeding into it in the sense of if you’ve already had handbacks what is your experience? What were the blockers? What made it easy? What was the relationship, in the sense did they become more strained? Or was it more collaborative? Or was everybody going legal on each other and making an absolute nightmare of it?

GEORGE STEVENSON Next Monday, if you’re interested in retrospective fire strategies then we’ve got that session at 11am. And we’ve got another one on Awaab’s Law which is damp on mould, on next Thursday the 13th. And finally the development group meeting is tomorrow at 3pm.

CHAT

Andrew Perry (External)….. Always assuming that the Fire System was fully commissioned as opposed to "just enough" to get PC

Andrew Perry (External)…. Very rare that a Full "Schedule of Obligations" is produced - read - understood - updated.

Andrew Couldridge (Unverified)…. Apologies....I have to leave to get to site. Would really like an example of a handover pack you are using, that you are happy to share. Thanks. andrew.couldridge@pinnaclegroup.co.uk

Academic Summary – 360 PFI/PPP Working Group Meeting (05 Nov 2025)

Context and Focus

The meeting explored handover, data accuracy and lifecycle information management within PFI and PPP projects.

Participants discussed Regulation 38, developer responsibilities, and the growing relevance of 360 photography and digital data in managing the “Golden Thread” of building information.

Speakers included George Stevenson, Andrew Couldridge, Andrew Perry, Matt Wilkie, Pierre Venter, Yogesh Luhar, Michael Harper and Justin Gillard.

1 Handover Challenges and Regulation 38

• Andrew Couldridge described persistent problems at technical handover: equipment delivered before rooms are complete, unresolved compartmentation issues, and contractors continuing work in “handed-over” spaces.
• He noted that under Regulation 38, occupation can occur before full readiness, creating conflict between developers seeking revenue and FM teams seeking compliance.
• Couldridge emphasised that documentation should state “is and does” rather than “will be or should have”, to prove as-built accuracy.
• The group agreed that developers’ motivation and ownership of quality are essential for improvement.

2 PFI Handback and Information Liability

• George Stevenson linked these issues to PFI schemes, where contract penalties exist for poor digital records yet non-compliance still occurs.
• Andrew Perry observed that organisations now face “an unpleasant touch of reality” as projects reach handback, discovering the cost of missing records.
• He argued that many have treated data management as a cost rather than a value asset, noting that consequences only emerge “when people are forced to put their hand on the hot metal”.
• Participants discussed ownership of cost and liability, noting that contractual penalties and “special measures” drive reactive rather than preventative behaviour.

3 Incomplete O&M Information and Loss of Data

• Stevenson recounted a case where an FM contractor faced a £1.3 million penalty for outdated O&Ms stored as a 38-gig PDF.
• His team reverse-engineered the file into a database, exposing that the FM had accepted incomplete O&Ms through a financial settlement that was taken as profit rather than used to update data.
• Couldridge described receiving large file transfers through WeTransfer or SharePoint that immediately lose a single data source.
• He called for Building Control verification of O&Ms and highlighted cases where equipment counts and specifications were uncertain.

4 Data Integrity and Uncontrolled Changes

• Matt Wilkie gave examples of additional maglocks and CCTV units installed without formal record, leading to unexpected maintenance and budget overspend.
• Unverified additions undermine compliance and inflate service-contract costs.
• The discussion showed that poor record control extends to fire door systems, alarm panels and tenant-added equipment.

5 Golden Thread and Responsibility for Compliance

• Michael Harper and Yogesh Luhar confirmed that incomplete or missing O&Ms remain common across PFI contracts.
• Harper noted that new managers often “find no O&Ms on SharePoint”, stressing the need to maintain the Golden Thread.
• Couldridge questioned whether a Building Assessment Certificate is adequate proof of compliance, arguing that compartmentation breaches can still exist despite certification.
• Pierre Venter explained that certificates must be linked to updates and stored in a coordinated CDE to maintain traceability and ownership through the building’s lifetime.

6 Digital Tools and 360 Photography

• George Stevenson introduced 360 photography as a low-cost way to capture as-installed conditions and support Regulation 38 verification.
• Matt Wilkie described using 360 images during handover to evidence plant condition, compare against service reports and demonstrate fire stopping before ceilings close.
• He noted that 360 records assist with dilapidations, audits and verification of “what was there and what should be there.”
• The discussion contrasted 360 photography with photogrammetry: the latter requires costly point-cloud surveys, while 360 imagery can be achieved with £400 cameras.

7 Cost, Ownership and Deliverables

• Couldridge repeatedly linked challenges to cost and unclear deliverables: management companies inherit incomplete data yet are expected to fund remedial work.
• He argued that 360 capture should be a developer deliverable, not a service-charge expense.
• Stevenson acknowledged developers’ financial constraints but emphasised the protective value of accurate digital records.

8 Integrating Data and Standards

• Participants discussed aligning classification systems – Uniclass, NRM and SFG20 – to support consistent outputs across construction and maintenance.
• Pierre Venter highlighted the need to define input/output standards for COBie and other schemas.
• Andrew Perry stressed that structured, linked data enables everyone to draw different insights “from the same data lake,” supporting both maintenance and strategic asset management.
• The group agreed that ownership of data elements and competence of responsible parties are vital for maintaining assurance.

9 Roles, Accountability and Handover Processes

• Justin Gillard presented a spreadsheet showing that some developers list the principal contractor as responsible for asset-information delivery at RIBA Stage 6.
• He explained that, in practice, this responsibility often passes to subcontractors, creating ambiguity.
• Venter emphasised that BIM management documents must apply to whoever delivers the final information and that competence and capability should be assessed early.
• The discussion concluded that clear allocation of roles and responsibilities is essential to avoid information gaps at handover and handback.

10 Next Steps

• Participants proposed a future session focused on handback experiences and practical solutions.
• Stevenson outlined upcoming BIM4Housing workshops on fire strategy plans and Awaab’s Law (damp and mould).
• The meeting closed with agreement on the value of collaborative discussion and data standardisation to support safe, accountable asset management.

Key Insights & Lessons Learned