Welcome to the Property Asset Management (PAM) profession website for central civil government.
My name is Sherin Aminossehe and I am Deputy Director and Head of Regional Strategy in the Government Property Unit (GPU). Over the last two and a half years, during a very busy and productive period in the world of Government Property, a lot of great work has been done to make the government estate more efficient by eliminating waste and delivering significant savings for the taxpayer. We have seen public servants exit from more than 1,070 buildings, allowing them to be released for sale or lease, and achieved savings in excess of £362 million.
The Government Estate is a vital national asset, which we need to use better: to reduce costs and to reinvest savings in front line public services. By activating the estate, we can also enable working practices that are modern and flexible while helping government reduce its carbon footprint. During my tenure as chairman of the PAM Skills Group, I will strive to continue the good work that has already been done and work with property management colleagues from all parts of the public sector to find new ways of enhancing the value of Government’s property portfolio.
The PAM Profession is a collective of a number of professions which have property as the common denominator. It is a new profession, having been formally launched by Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence in June 2010. There is no exclusive membership of the PAM community. According to our recent PAM Survey (2012) just over a half of the community is professionally qualified, while a third of members have no formal qualifications but have significant experience operating within the property field in central civil government. The opinions and perspectives of all of these specialists are important to our work so if you have responsibilities in this area then you are already one of us.
I am very aware of the importance of the skilled and capable people we have managing property and its associated services, such as facilities and building management. Property does not manage itself. It requires dedicated teams with a mixture of skills, ranging from the technical practitioners through to the softer people management specialists, such as customer focus and management of change. These collection of skills make up what we call the ‘intelligent client’ – the core capability required in departments and government organisations in order to satisfy its internal customer requirements as well as manage the wide range of property-related services which are increasingly provided by the private sector.
Above all, this requires commercial awareness on the part of our professional community – an understanding of both the commercial drivers of the property industry and how property assets need to align with departmental business objectives. It is gratifying to see that ‘Achieving Commercial Outcomes’ has been adopted as a core competence in the new Civil Service Competency Framework which will be in place for the next reporting year. The PAM Profession’s own Competence Framework complements this and can be used to demonstrate compliance with the new requirements using the competencies required to be a PAM practitioner.
This is a challenging time for us in property asset management. The government’s determination to make savings in all sectors means we need to think of new ways of managing property assets in the future. Departments are already looking hard at how they can make efficiency savings through economies of scale and here in the GPU we are looking at how this can be done across the whole of the public sector estate, and specifically within central government. Successful solutions will depend on the combined skills and capability of our professional community and we will be doing all we can to support our people to develop in the future.
Please visit the website regularly to learn about the work we are doing and to pick up the latest news about successes and accomplishments. I would also welcome your views and opinions on the work we are doing so please make use of the contact e-mail link below.
Sherin Aminossehe
Head of the Property Asset Management Profession
Contact us: PAMWebsite@cabinet-office.gsi.gov.uk