Sustainable built asset management performance indicators and attributes : a UK social housing case study example

Abstract

This paper aims to identify key performance indicators (KPI), and their correspondingattributes, required to successfully manage asset management sustainably in a built environmentcontext. Improving the sustainability of existing housing stock is a major challenge facing the UK socialhousing sector. There is a lack of support to navigate the growing and often incongruent informationrelating to sustainable development and how to operationalise it. The problem is twofold; firstly, thecurrent (single criterion) condition-based approach to maintenance planning constrains AssetManagers and does not fully address the social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainability.Secondly, the toolkits available for assessing the sustainability of housing are often generic and aretime consuming and expensive to implement. This paper reports the findings of a participatoryresearch project with a leading London based housing association, using a series of landlord andtenant workshops to derive a set of attributes associated with key performance indicators (KPIs) tofully reflect the local requirements of the landlord and their interpretation of the sustainabilityagenda. Five KPIs considered to be measurable, directly affected by maintenance work andindependent of each other were identified by this landlord (comfort, running costs, adaptability,maintenance costs and community).The resulting outputs, in a policy context, will provide a clearroute-map to social housing landlords of how to improve the sustainability of their housing stock withthe additional benefits of addressing fuel poverty, carbon emissions targets whilst at the same timehelp create and maintain housing in which people want to live. The proposed approach is flexibleenough to incorporate the individual requirements of landlords, be able to adapt to changes ingovernment policy (local and central) in a timely, robust, transparent and inclusive format