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January 2026 update: The Love Our Buildings pilot schemes at South Kensington and Hammersmith Hospital campuses have now concluded. Thank you to all who participated by reporting issues and providing mid-trial feedback. Please see below for an update on our performance.
How did our trials go?
South Kensington
Across the trial period, 6,532 jobs were raised, including 4,327 reactive jobs, 836 cleaning tasks and 1,369 minor works. Responsiveness improved significantly, with almost 75% of reactive jobs attended to within the <6 hour target time, reflecting the more agile and customer-focused service the Property Division is pursuing.
Plumbing, drainage, lighting and carpentry were the most common areas of demand. A core focus of the South Kensington trial was improving cleaning within our 5 trial buildings. Improvements here were achieved through more using toilet sensor data to optimise cleaning rotas, coordinated liaison with maintenance and building champions and increased quality assurance checks. This clearer picture of where activity is focused will help us continue to target support effectively.
By enabling the LOB facilities manager to scope and resolve tickets and projects directly, we were also able to reduce costs by up to 36% when compared with our projected trial costs.
Hammersmith Hospital
Across the trial period, 2,523 maintenance requests were raised, including 1,330 reactive jobs, 388 cleaning tasks and 805 minor works. Responsiveness improved significantly, with almost 60% of reactive jobs attended to within four hours or less, reflecting the more agile and customer-focused service the Property Division is pursuing.
Carpentry, plumbing, cleaning and lighting were the most common areas of demand, and the majority of requests were concentrated in the Commonwealth, ICTEM and Wolfson buildings, which together accounted for around 90% of all jobs raised. This clearer picture of where activity is focused will help us continue to target support effectively.
By enabling the LOB facilities manager to scope and resolve tickets and projects directly, we were also able to reduce costs by up to 40% when compared with our projected trial costs.
What was Love Our Buildings?
Love Our Buildings was a trial approach to how we manage and maintain our campuses.
It was developed in recognition that we needed to design a model that makes responding to everyday maintenance frustrations easier and quicker.
Building users were encouraged to do this via:
Pillars of activity
Building Champions
We trialled Building Champions as friendly, familiar faces around your building to provide easy points of contact.
Champions proactively coordinated how defects were fixed, made sure rooms were in top condition, and found ways to improve the building experience.
Small works
To support the Building Champions, we created a rapid response small works team of tradespeople for day-to-day, non-urgent maintenance. The team sped up how we responded to everyday issues, with an objective to initially respond to maintenance requests within 4 hours (during working hours).
What kinds of jobs were covered?
The project was designed to improve how we responded to 'low-level' maintenance issues; problems that are not necessarily urgent, but nonetheless cause everyday frustrations. This included:
- Window drafts
- Flickering or faulty lights
- Toilet/plumbing issues
- Broken blinds
- Damaged walls/doors
- Decorating issues
By creating additional resource to tackle these issues, we were able to free up capacity for our standard maintenance teams to focus on more urgent, time-sensitive problems.
What was the rationale?
Our maintenance team are asked to respond to over 95,000 defect reports each year, ranging from a flickering light bulb to issues that may close entire buildings. Historically, they have been asked to prioritise issues more complex, time-sensitive defects.
As demonstrated in the 2023 UniForum survey, however, the result is that too often the ‘simple’, day-to-day fixes are too slow and are dependent on complex external contractors. Over time, this has produced a feeling that certain areas of campus are insufficiently looked after.
Love Our Buildings aimed to create more resource for the ‘smaller’ tasks, thereby freeing up our maintenance team to fully focus on the urgent issues.