Most councils decide to consolidate office space before they can prove it is the right call. The saving appears in the medium term financial plan, a target is attached to it, and the estates team is then asked to produce evidence for a decision that has effectively already been announced. That sequence is normal across local government, and it is also the reason so many consolidation papers get deferred rather than approved.
The problem is rarely that a council has no occupancy data. Most have something, whether that is door access logs, a one-off utilization survey commissioned from a consultancy, or a spreadsheet maintained by a facilities officer. The problem is that a council estates decision is held to a standard that a comparable private sector decision is not, and most of that data was never gathered with that standard in mind.
Why The Standard Is Different
When a company gives up two floors, the decision is taken in a board meeting and the reasoning stays inside the organization. When a council closes an office, the paper goes to cabinet or scrutiny, it is published, members can question the officer who wrote it, residents can read it, and the underlying data can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act. If a building is sold or a lease is surrendered, the decision cannot realistically be reversed, and the administration that approves it may not be the one defending it after the next election.
There is also the rest of the estate to account for. A council’s offices sit alongside depots, libraries, leisure centers and customer service points, and the case for closing a civic building often depends on whether staff can be absorbed elsewhere in that estate, or into shared accommodation with a health board, a police force or a neighboring authority. Occupancy in a co-located building is never fully within one organization’s control, which makes the evidence harder to assemble and easier to challenge. Add the consultation obligations that come with changing where people work, and the fact that any redeployment has to be justified to unions as well as to members, and the evidence requirement becomes fairly demanding.
Four Tests The Evidence Has To Pass
It Has To Predate The Decision
Data gathered after a savings target is set will always look like justification. Data that has been running for a year or more before anyone proposed a consolidation is a record of how the estate actually behaves, and it is far harder to argue with. This is the most common weakness in consolidation papers, and it is a function of timing rather than of measurement quality, which means it can only be fixed by starting earlier.
It Has To Cover Long Enough To Show A Pattern
Council attendance varies by season, by service area and by the point in the financial year. A survey run across two weeks in November tells you about two weeks in November. Continuous measurement across a full year lets you say what a typical Tuesday looks like in each building, and lets you separate a genuine decline in use from a seasonal dip that will reverse in the spring.
It Has To Be Comparable Across Sites
Consolidation decisions are relative. You are deciding which building to keep, which means every site in scope has to be measured the same way over the same period. Where different offices have been surveyed by different methods at different times, the comparison tends to collapse under the first question a member asks about methodology.
It Has To Be Explainable To A Non-Specialist
A cabinet member will not interrogate a sensor deployment methodology, but they will ask what the number means and how confident the officer is in it. Evidence that requires a technical preamble before it can be understood generally does not survive the meeting, regardless of how sound it is.
Where The Usual Sources Fall Short
Door access and badge data records entry to a building, which is useful for security and much less useful for space planning, because it says nothing about whether a floor, a wing or a meeting room was used once someone was inside. Headcount figures describe policy and contractual arrangements rather than behavior. Booking records, taken on their own, describe intent, and in most organizations a meaningful share of bookings are never honored.
None of this makes those sources worthless. It makes them insufficient on their own for a decision that has to be defended in public, which is why workplace analytics built on verified presence rather than entry or intent has become the practical baseline for public sector estates teams.
What It Looks Like When The Evidence Is In Place
Denbighshire County Council had already reduced its number of office sites when it started measuring occupancy properly, which put it in a familiar position: committed to a direction, without the evidence to show whether it had cut too far or not far enough. Continuous occupancy data across its buildings confirmed which sites were genuinely well used and which were not, and gave the council a basis for further decisions rather than a retrospective defense of earlier ones.
Two details from that work are worth drawing out, because both are common across the sector. The first is that leadership had assumed Wednesday was the busiest day in the office, and the data showed the actual peak was Thursday. That is a small finding with large consequences, because peak day is what capacity is sized against, and because a hybrid policy built on the wrong peak produces crowding on one day and empty floors on another. It is also the kind of assumption that sits unexamined inside a consolidation paper until somebody checks it.
The second is reporting time. The council’s facilities team had been reconciling spreadsheets over hours or days to produce reports for leadership, and with current data available on demand those reports now take minutes. In a local authority context this matters more than it sounds, because the reporting cycle around committee dates is fixed and unforgiving, and because officer time spent assembling a paper is officer time not spent on the estate itself.
Where To Start If The Decision Is Already In The Plan
If a consolidation is scheduled for a future financial year, the useful work now is not modeling the saving. It is starting the measurement, so that by the time the paper is written there is a year of continuous, comparable data behind it that nobody can characterize as having been produced to order.
Practically, that means measuring presence rather than entry, covering every site in scope rather than the ones that are easiest to instrument, running it continuously rather than in survey windows, and holding it in a form that can be reported at building and service level, because that is the level at which members and directors ask their questions. Councils that get consolidation approved first are generally not the ones with the most sophisticated analysis. They are the ones who started collecting the evidence before they needed it.
If your authority is working toward a consolidation or a hybrid policy review, book a demo with our workplace operations experts to see what a defensible evidence base looks like across a public sector estate.
