LGPC Insights

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC) Across local government, attention is understandably focused on the pressures that dominate the budget round: temporary accommodation costs, social care demand, the gap in the medium-term financial strategy, and the service transformation programmes that are supposed to close it. Estate decisions, where they feature at all, tend to surface as a means to an end - a capital receipt to plug a gap, a disposal

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC) The condition survey occupies a comfortable place in council estate management. It is a defined, professional product, familiar to officers and members alike, with established scoring conventions and a recognisable deliverable. When asked whether an authority has a handle on its estate, the answer most frequently offered is that a condition survey programme is in place. The implication is that estate intel

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC) When an authority holds an ageing building it no longer needs in its current use, and also faces a pressing service need - temporary accommodation, supported living, specialist provision for adults with a learning disability - the two problems appear to solve each other. Convert the building. Reuse what you already own. Avoid the cost and the controversy of demolition, avoid a capital outlay on a new site,

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC) Watch a difficult estate decision move through a council, and a pattern repeats itself. Every active option is interrogated. The disposal is challenged on the receipt it will raise, the political reaction it will provoke, the precedent it will set. The redevelopment is challenged on cost, risk, delivery time and planning uncertainty. The repurposing is challenged on whether the service case truly justifies

The councils that succeed will be those that recognise that reorganisation is not only a question of structures and governance. It is also a physical project. It requires leaders to redraw the shape of their estate, to make choices about where services sit, to identify land that could do more than it does today, and to confront the reality that some buildings belong in the past, not the future. Those that start early, work collaboratively and ground their decisions in evidenc

By Kane Lennon, Director, Local Government Property Consultants (LGPC) (December 2025) Councils have always known that temporary accommodation is expensive. What has changed is the speed and scale at which those costs have risen, and the extent to which they now threaten the wider financial stability of local government. Housing people in crisis is an unavoidable legal duty, but it has become one of the most significant and unpredictable pressures councils face. The nationa