The Journey to Building the World’s Smartest Campuses at Edgbaston and Dubai

Ryan Condon (Host):

Trevor is the Director of Estates at the University of Birmingham.

Trevor has worked with well-known companies and Universities including a number of NHS Trusts including Barts Health NHS Trust which is the largest in the UK and Low Carbon Europe which offers practical and accessible support for all parts of the NHS in its drive to become more sustainable.

Trevor has been awarded numerous sustainability, building, construction awards & Times Higher Outstanding Estates Strategy Award 2021 so it will be great to get his take on facilities management.

Lauren Nicholson (Organiser):

So first of all, thanks for joining us today, Trevor. We really appreciate your time talking to us today about facilities management. I’m Lauren, our podcast organizer. And as I mentioned previously, we find that facility teams are often underrated, which I’m sure you agree with. So hopefully, with your podcast, we are going to further highlight the importance of FM to our audience. We do these podcasts to get insights from experts in the facilities management field and we learn a lot from your experience. We understand that the university is now a smart campus, which involves a pathway to net zero carbon emissions by 2035. So, we know your insights will be really helpful for our listeners. With that said, I’ll pass you over to our hosts, our Senior Research Analyst, Charlie and our Head of Content, Ryan.

Ryan:

Perfect, thank you. So, Trevor, we always start these chats with a sort of origin-based story. So, if you could just give us some insight into the journey that led you to your first director role at Horton General Hospital NHS Trust.

Trevor Payne (Guest):

Yeah, sure. Well, I actually started as an electrical apprentice. So, it’s one of the reasons I’m quite passionate about apprenticeships, because I can give a real life story of how I’ve come through that journey. I mean, the NHS looked after me, really, put me through a lot of training, a lot of support, and I had to move quite a few times, different hospitals, different roles, and sort of every step I took, I took a step up. So it took quite a while, but… Yeah, eventually got to the point I was director of estates and facilities at Barts Health and then I left the NHS about eight years ago and joined the University of Birmingham.

Ryan:

Yeah, and you mentioned it there, you know, you’ve occupied various different managerial roles throughout NHS healthcare environments before going to Barts Health, the largest NHS trust. How vast was the difference in terms of size of operations and tasks when comparing Barts Health NHS to previous hospitals you’d worked at? Like how big was the jump?

Trevor:

Well, so I’ve made a series of gradual jumps. So, every time I moved, it was to a bigger hospital with another set of services that I was looking after or a PFI that was being developed. So gradually you ease yourself into new things you’re looking after, different ways of managing because managing PFIs were different to managing an in-house team, as you’d appreciate. So, by the time I got to Barts, it was actually made up by a number of hospitals. So Mile End, Whipps Cross, Newham and the Royal London at Whitechapel. So individually they were hospitals in their own right. So, you know, pretty sizable, pretty big geography to look after as well. You know, getting backwards and forwards from meetings was just a task in itself. I did a lot of work on the tube.

Ryan:

That’s fantastic. And then obviously you’ve now on Director of Estates at the University of Birmingham. You know, you took that jump. So, if you could just talk us through what your typical day looks like in that role and how easy or challenging was the transition from a healthcare environment to an educational environment.

Trevor:

Well, I guess the first thing I’d say is there’s a huge number of similarities. I mean, huge estates, big campus setups, lots of buildings of certain ages. So, if I look at Birmingham, we’ve got a lot of buildings that are listed that were built in the sort of 1900s that are being used now for things that they would never even imagine to be used for at the moment. And that’s exactly the same with the NHS. We generate a lot of our power on campus. We’re big consumers of energy. We create lots of carbon emissions. So, you know, we recruit lots of people, employ lots of people in the local environment. We’re very similar to hospitals in terms of community hubs. So, the transition wasn’t that difficult, to be honest, because it was very similar. I mean, there are some differences as well. But in terms of your question about what a typical day is, I guess you always get the answer there. There are no typical days there.

I mean, you set out on a Monday morning with a week. full of diary commitments and meetings and then something happens, and it takes you off in a different direction. I mean at the moment I’m doing a lot of work around master planning so that’s a big focus of my attention at the moment is around what does the future look like and what might a campus look like in 2045 and 2050.

Ryan:

Yeah, and that leads us in perfectly into the smart campuses in both Edgbaston and Dubai, which just sounds as such an incredibly exciting project to be leading. If you could just talk to us more about the intentions behind that project, the progress of it and your involvement in the project as well.

Trevor:

Yeah sure, well if I start with Dubai first of all. So, Dubai opened as a campus just over a year ago and that was a six, just over a six year project for me. So, it started off with some land acquisition and then procuring a partner, getting an architect on board, working up a design. So, it was literally a clean sheet of paper. Now you don’t often get to do that in a career, build a campus, a university campus from scratch. So, we wanted to make sure we built it and designed it with smart in mind. We wanted to try and future proof it.

Now that’s easy to say and difficult to deliver, particularly when you start to get people to think about how they might operate differently in 10- or 15 years’ time, it just doesn’t always land. So, I guess one of the main things you need to do is think about flexibility of design and make sure you know a building is going to change use during its life several times, you know, you’re going to have to replace items of equipment. It’s about building in maintainability, flexibility, and being honest, you won’t have all the answers. And I’ve seen that too many times in brand new hospital builds. Almost on day one when you open the front door, you get the contractors back in to start changing things around because these projects are so long in the making. What you think you want when you start the design to what you need when you open it, open the front doors five or six years later is completely different. Technology has changed, clinical practice has changed if you look at it from a healthcare perspective. Pedagogy and teaching will have changed from a university perspective and we saw how those things changed quickly during lockdown when everyone flipped to this type of environment where we were all interacting online and from a university perspective we were carrying our exams online, we were teaching online. Things that we never ever thought we would do or would be able to do we flipped pretty quickly.

Change is always difficult to try and design in when you’re looking at a campus, but we wanted to build it as a smart campus. So, we wanted to embrace technology, we wanted to make sure we used data that was generated in the campus, in the building and in the campus as part of a living lab. We wanted to use our university researchers to use that data and that can be as simple as understanding how the building is performing, how much energy we’re consuming, how much heat is in some of the rooms and that’s important in those sorts of climates. to make sure that we can give people choice because some people want to study in a warmer area or a quieter area or a noisier or quieter area or you know they want to study on their own or they want to study in groups and what we need to do is give them data to enable them to have choices.

Ryan:

Yeah, that’s fascinating. We’ve recently spoke to Laura Wright, who was Head of Workplace at ABRI and she mentioned a lot about the workspace wellbeing and how people work better in different environments. So, it’s interesting to figure out what sort of data you’ve collected on that, you know, what works best. Just going back to when you mentioned about how the difficulties of working with listed buildings, for example, in the NHS, that must be that must go a lot into the planning of new buildings. So, you mentioned about them being flexible when you build them so they can last another 20, 30 years. What do you take from the challenges of working with listed buildings where you can’t change anything to then having the freedom of, ah, let’s build this?

Trevor:

Yeah, well look that was part of the beauty of working on the new Dubai campus. We could, we had a clean sheet of paper, we could learn lessons that we could then reapply back to existing buildings in Edgbaston, Birmingham. I mean some of the challenges of working with listed buildings and don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some beautiful buildings. You know, we’re custodians of a fantastic estate, but it’s not easy sometimes. I mean, we have the legacy of Asbestos that we have to manage and look after and work safely. We’ve got the challenge around single glazing, poor insulation, acoustics. So, it’s trying to work with what you’ve got. Now, sometimes you can do that, but sometimes you just can’t fit everything in that you need to do or get the right environment. And that’s going to be an ongoing challenge for us, certainly as we start to look ahead for our listed buildings. As we start to decarbonize our heat network, we’re going to have to take a fabric-first approach. And really dive in and start to look at the insulation and the thermal properties of the buildings. You know, we’re going to have to look at secondary glazing, and different radiator systems. So, I think we’ve got a whole load of challenges coming, queuing up down the road that are going to sort of hit us pretty soon.

Ryan:

Yeah, and obviously there’ll be quite a contrast between Birmingham and Dubai where you’re putting the double glazing of the heat in.

Trevor:

Yeah, I mean, so in terms of similarities with Dubai, we’ve created external courtyards and we orientated the building to make sure we made the most of solar shading. So, we’ve got fantastic outside courtyards that are shaded for most of the day. So quite a chunk of the year you can use that outside space and that becomes an external classroom or study space. And we wanted to try and do the same thing in Birmingham and we’ve achieved it in certain areas where we’ve got but we’re at the sort of mercy of the weather in Brougham. But I think it’s a challenge to try and make sure that you don’t just focus on the buildings, you start to look at the glue and the spaces between buildings and how people move across a campus and how people want to gather and interact. And sometimes that’s not in the building, that’s in external space. And it’s a big focus for us is how we make that accessible and how we can make it more usable.

Ryan:

Yeah, fascinating. And you touched on it previously about the Living Lab. And I read a fascinating article where you emphasise that point that universities have the potential to be living labs. Could you just elaborate on that a bit more?

Trevor:

Yeah, happy to. So, the first thing is we’ve got some fantastic academics. So, we’ve got the research potential there within our team. If you look at Birmingham and the University of Birmingham, we’re sort of a small town size operation. We’ve got across our campus, we’ve got more than 200 buildings. We’ve got sort of 9000 trees. We’re quite a green and leafy campus. We create our own energy for 70% of our use. So, we’ve got power stations. We’ve got theatres, sports centres, hotels. We are a small town, stroke small city. So, anything that we do, any investment that we make, we wanted to make sure that we learnt from it because there are lessons and really good research that we can share with local authorities and councils and other organisations up and down the country. So why not use the investment that we know that we need to make to create some research, generate data and learn from it and want to bring our academics into that thinking as well. So rather than just going out and replacing the boilers like for like, let’s have a conversation with the academics. Let’s work out, you know, what’s the most efficient replacement? How do we measure the data to show that we’ve made a significant difference? How can we then evidence that this is the right thing that others could do as well? So that’s really the living lab. It’s making sure that we take all of those opportunities to get the most out of every pound that we spend.

Ryan:

and you mentioned it there, a small town in a big city, it must be a big team that you’ve got to help generate this living lab.

Trevor:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a great team that we’ve got and it’s very different to the NHS, going back to the question you asked earlier. They’re all in-house, so they all work in-house. A lot of them have worked at the university for a long period of time, so we’re a good employer. We’re a good employer for the local community. We spend a lot of money in Birmingham as well. But yeah, there’s about 200 in the estates team. There’s a team of sort of 35 gardeners looking after campus and sports pitches. So, you know, it’s, I don’t look after the soft FM and the cleaning as part of my remit, but there’s another wider, bigger team as well that look after all of those sorts of catering and security and services as well so it’s a big operation.

Ryan:

Fascinating. And on top of all that, there were the preparations for the 2022 Commonwealth Games. How was that?

Trevor:

Yeah, well, that’s fantastic. I mean, it was the biggest pop-up that we sort of arranged on campus. So, we did pop up a fully functioning Commonwealth game standard hockey pitch where England played and we had royalty visit, you know, and we had seen the weather was kind to us and it really showed Birmingham at its best and it reminded me when I worked in London in 2012 for the Olympics. It was same sort of feel, same sort of community feel around the events that were going on. But from a university perspective, we housed the student village, so we turned student accommodation into the athletes village. And that was the first time the Commonwealth Games had done that because typically they get more than four years notice of when they’re going to run these events. So, there’s a big investment in infrastructure across the city that’s hosting it. They usually create a new Olympic village or Commonwealth village and that becomes part of the legacy of the games after they’ve moved on. But Birmingham found out pretty late in the day so we didn’t have time to create some of that, so we had to use things that were existing which was good and it played to the most sustainable games ever message that Birmingham was pushing. But yeah, I mean it’s a once in a career thing really but it was fantastic. Good for the team, good for the university, good for the city.

Ryan:

Yeah, amazing. And was that a stressful period, you know, having that timeframe and having a switch student accommodation round?

Trevor:

Yeah, it was a lot to think about. It was 14 long days of lots of things happening in lots of locations all at the same time. So, everybody was on their toes but the team performed fantastically and yeah really good.

Ryan:

Brilliant.

Charlie Green (Host):

Just going to hop back, you mentioned embracing tech. So just a quick question on that. We saw a clip where you were a gateway panelist for the RBS Innovation Project. And in that clip you mentioned there’s a lot of tech that isn’t proven. It’s good tech, but there isn’t trial it and put it in a working environment. And this was back in 2014, so nine years ago now. Do you still feel this is the case with the use and deployment of smart tech in built environments, or do you believe it’s evolved significantly in how it’s used and deployed?

Trevor:

That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? That was when I was back at the NHS. Yeah, so it is, I think it’s better now. I think technologies moved on. If you look at sensor technology, there’s a lot more sort of fit and forget technology that you could deploy now, particularly around sensors, smart Bluetooth sensors. If you look at Internet of Things and how we might start to embrace that approach as part of the smart campus, I think we’re still… trialing and testing things. So, we’ve currently got call out to the market for innovators and tech firms and tech providers to work with us. We’ve got a Dragon’s Den we’re setting up in October this year. Because we are looking to deliver a project which is going to deliver five net zero carbon lodges, accommodation houses on campus. But basically, we’re looking at everything from building products, free to tech, white goods, solar panels. so that we can combine all of that technology in five small buildings, which are very typical buildings you’d find in most cities. So, it’s a mixture of three, four bedroom detached type properties with one of them being listed. And the idea is it’s a miniature version of the living lab. So, if we can bring all that tech together in one location and make it work and have synergy with the tech, because that’s the other thing, a lot of these technical solutions. standalone. When you bring them all together, that’s when you start to see the benefit of internet of things and connectivity. So that’s what we’re trying to pull off at the moment. As things stand, if it moves quickly, we’ll have two ready in about a year’s time. So, we are really trying to race to get some of this stuff moving along. But it plays back to your question about, we need to sort of take a chance with some of these providers and give them the opportunity to prove some of their technology, because it’s tough. You know, I know. I remember when people used to try and sell technology into the NHS. It’s a tough old gig, you know, and somebody has to take a bit of a chance at some stage to test a bit of technology in a measured and controlled way. But somebody has to be first to deploy stuff and, you know, people can be reluctant sometimes.

Charlie:

Internet of Things and industry 4.0 like super interesting. So that’s a really interesting take.

Lauren:

Yeah, it sounds like you’re doing amazing work with bringing in new tech. And as we touched on earlier, an important aspect of this podcast is to drive appreciation for FM teams. So, we feel it’s important to recognise how hard the people within the NHS work, but also we feel it’s similar with people working in education, especially taking into account the influences that your work will probably have on future generations in the universities. So, with that. What value do you think FM teams bring to a university which might otherwise go unnoticed?

Trevor:

I’m sure a lot of it does go unnoticed and that’s the nature of what we do. I mean, we’re there at four in the morning doing things behind the scenes, making sure that things are ready for when students turn up and staff turn up to work. And that’s the gig. We don’t do it for flowers and awards. it’s always nice to be recognised and appreciated but that is part of what we do you know and if I look at our grounds and gardens teams they’re the ones that are out at two in the morning when the snow’s falling and the ice is on the ground to make sure that they’re gritting and getting ready for campus to open the next the next morning and a lot of stuff that we do is behind the scenes that’s just the very sort of nature of what we do. We do stray in front of house occasionally in the NHS and in in higher education where we have to go in and fix stuff in operating theatres and lecture rooms and you know research facilities but we’ve got good competent teams so they can play in both of those spaces so they’re very comfortable and competent to do that.

Lauren:

Right, so in terms of working in such large facilities like the trusts and universities that you’ve worked with, how, I know you say, you don’t need flowers or awards for it, but how would you go about driving that appreciation and where you are so behind the scenes at so much of the time? How would you shout about your work?

Trevor:

Well, both in the NHS and the trust that I’ve worked in and at the university, we have staff reward and recognition systems in place. So, there is the ability to recognise awards and we’ve had security win it before. We’ve had the cleaners; we’ve had the grounds and gardens team. So, they do get recognised and it’s great. And I think we’re all part of a community to be honest. And I think there’s recognition that none of us can do our jobs if the others didn’t do what they needed to do. You know, it was always the case in the NHS, you know, you couldn’t operate in an operating theatre unless someone had been in and made sure that the filters were right in the air and the ventilation systems are working and everybody depends on everyone else. Sometimes people forget that or don’t recognize it but a lot of the time it is recognized and people are appreciated.

Ryan:

I really like the community feel both in how you’re involved in the city and your facilities teams as well. It’s nice and refreshing to hear that you are being appreciated as FM’s as well. Here at Comparesoft we know the number of different products that are out there for basically more or less every need in facilities, so software wise. A lot of customers stick to using spreadsheets or other manual processes to manage their activities. From our research, we’ve managed teams of about 220 estate professionals, products worth £1.2 billion. It would just be great to know your approach in relation to using tools or software for managing large products and teams.

Trevor:

We use a lot of tools and software. To be honest, we’re going through a consolidation exercise at the moment. I mean, when I joined the university, we had pretty much a database for everything, which in its day was probably, there was a reason for it, but it becomes difficult to keep on top of things. Sharing information, having a single version of the truth is difficult. Software becomes unsupported over time, and you end up with a legacy system with problems that you have to keep propping up. So, we’re going through an exercise at the moment to create what we’ve called a common data environment, which is a different way of holding our data. We’re putting more asset data in. We’re putting a bigger focus on BIM. And that’s for our new buildings, but also buildings that we’ve got. So, we’ve got some sort of retrospective information going in around BIM surveys. We’ve just had a big survey on a thermographic survey on all of the external elevations of our listed properties. going to need to know which ones we tackle first if we need to look at glazing and fabric improvements. So, there’s a lot of data that we have, a lot of data that we need to access on a regular basis. We’re constantly looking at systems. CAFM is important to us. I won’t mention the names of the companies that we use, but we rely on them as partners. We work with them to try and develop solutions. So, as we come up with ideas, we go to our partners first of all and say, well, is this something you can help us out with? Because what we don’t want to do is fall back to having lots and lots of people doing tiny bits of the process. So, it’s an ongoing dialogue, to be honest, but data and dashboards and performance information and real-time information, I think, has to be right up there as a requirement for states and facilities directors. And, you know, as we start to look being smarter in terms of how we operate campuses and as we start to think about, you know, how robotics might start and automation might start to come in, data and the infrastructure that the data sits on is really, really.

Ryan:

That’s really interesting to learn the collaboration you have with your software vendor, you know, so that improves their tool, it improves how you use it as well, and the integration with the building management system with BIM, you know, the reliance on that is fascinating. You’re a thought leader in sustainability and FM, Net Zero Carbon Strategy, IoT deployment. What’s your biggest achievement in terms of sustainability and carbon management? And with that, what’s the biggest challenge you face with both of them?

Trevor:

Well, the biggest, if I do the back front, the biggest challenge was getting people to listen in the early days, not so much now. So, when I started, I’ve been at this for a long time. I mean, 25 plus years ago, I was having conversations about energy management and trying to, you know, be more efficient in how we operated. And then carbon became more of the focus of what we did. But now it’s a much easier conversation because everybody gets it. Everybody knows it’s important, everyone can see the impact that climate change is happening and it’s very real in the country now, so people see it’s closer to home. And you know students expect this and patients expect this and the public expects it, so we have to make sure that we’re taking this seriously and we do, the NHS takes it seriously I know and so does higher education. I mean one of the biggest achievements I think are I made, well, in the NHS, I set up NHS Sustainability Day, which was from a standing start, I think we ran it for seven years before I left. And it was really to make sure that on one day a year, there was a complete focus on sustainability. And we had clinicians, porters, cleaners, supply chain, everybody doing things around sustainability. And my argument was, well, if you can do it on one day a year, you can do it every day a year. And what we were trying to do was demonstrate that we could make a difference because it was difficult to get funding to do some of these things. So, the beauty of having that sort of day was it showed that you can make a difference, you can get people working together. So that was a huge achievement. So that’s probably the one that I hold onto, but in addition to that, there’s loads of stuff that we’ve done around combined heat and power plant and infrastructure and some of the stuff that I’ve done in Dubai and the campus and the way that operates from a sustainability perspective. You know, it’s been fantastic. It’s a really great opportunity stuff as well.

Ryan:

I’m sure that sustainability day opened a lot of people’s eyes up to it as well. You’ve been doing it for 25 years and you give all this experience to people on that one.

Trevor:

Yeah, no, it was great, and it also sort of generated a bit of a community. So, you know, we did work with NHS Forest. So, on the day we were planting trees to offset carbon emissions. We were, you know, doing things differently with transport and logistics. So, you know, we were looking across, not just within the estate’s environment, we were looking across the whole sort of supply chain and delivery network as well.

Ryan:

I’ve just got one final question, Trevor. We’re just looking towards the future. What advice would you give to facility managers now who are just beginning their sustainability journey?

Trevor:

Thank you. So, what I’d say is don’t give up because you’re going to get a lot of ‘no’s to the things that you suggest that you want to do. So, you’ve got to make sure you’re tenacious in terms of how you keep pushing the message. What I’d say is talk because there’s power in people. So, if you get people behind an idea, quite often if the idea is correct you’ve got a better chance of making it happen. I think keep an eye on technology because quite often there’s some really smart stuff out there. You know, you can automate aspects of things that you’re doing at the moment, things that you find difficult, you know, you can improve efficiency. So, it’s making sure you look within your network as well and have conversations about what other people have done. And the important parts of those conversations is sometimes it’s the things that didn’t work that are more important to find out about than the things that work because you don’t want to repeat bad mistakes. So, it’s making sure that you get a good network, that you’re tenacious, that you keep looking at technology. And have a good support network around you as well, because sometimes it’s a lonely old place when you’re delivering FM and you need somebody to talk to.

Ryan:

Yeah, and I’m sure these sustainability days are fantastic places to network and find people in the same area as well. Yeah, fantastic. Well, a huge thank you, Trevor. Thank you for your time chatting with us today. A seasoned expert in FM and sustainability. So, we know your insights have been very helpful for our listeners.

Trevor:

Thank you.