Shared infrastructure, stronger services: How to unlock value in the public sector estate

Matt Etherington, Public Sector Workplace Specialist at Matrix Booking explores how NHS and local authority estate sharing can transform services and budgets.

The shift to hybrid working in the UK public sector has created both a challenge and an opportunity around effective estates usage. While hybrid models offer staff flexibility, they’ve also put a spotlight on how public sector buildings are managed. From hospitals to council offices, the public sector estate is vast. It’s under pressure, budgets are tightening, space is often underused, and yet communities expect services to be more connected and accessible than ever.

The recent criticism of the UK government’s brand-new £150 million headquarters in Glasgow highlights the problem. After a recent visit to the headquarters, MP Angus Macdonald tweeted his disapproval of not only the “oppulance” of the offices, but also crucially the “emptiness” of the space. He later went on to tell The Times that the office was “massively over-specified” given the number of employees working from home – showcasing that, for public sector organisations, estates management is not just a matter of efficiency, it can have huge reputational impact.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that councils increasingly share space with partner organisations, government agencies and NHS Trusts. Take the NHS and local authorities: both hold large, expensive estates and face rising demand – from stretched health services to councils delivering housing, welfare and social care. Yet, despite often sharing premises, they still tend to operate in silos, duplicating costs and efforts while missing opportunities to integrate services under one roof.

The challenge: why estates are hard to share

Encouraging staff back into offices has proven difficult. Buildings can swing from half-empty to overcrowded depending on the day. For the NHS and local government, this makes planning even harder when teams share estate. They face too many empty desks on quiet days, but too little space on busy ones. This leads to frustrated staff and unnecessary costs – for example, lighting, heating or cooling an empty floor.

On top of this, cultural habits and operational silos make sharing difficult. NHS trusts and councils have long managed their estates separately, with different systems, regulations and funding streams. Concerns around accountability, data privacy and health and safety complicate estate sharing. And while investment is needed to redesign buildings and install supporting tech, budgets are tighter than ever.

Shared infrastructure, stronger services

However, there’s a significant opportunity: by reimagining the NHS and local authority estate as a connected body, organisations can eliminate duplication of efforts for overlapping communities, optimise space usage, reduce costs, better support cross-organisational collaboration and – most importantly – transform how services are delivered. We’ve seen this in action through the One Public Estate and Kent Connects’ Shared Spaces Project.

In practice, estate sharing can look like integrated community hubs for GPs, social workers and council welfare teams, which support faster referrals, earlier intervention and reduced duplication of efforts. It can also look like underused council offices hosting NHS outreach clinics or mental health drop-ins, while surplus NHS buildings could become council access points for children’s services hubs. It can also look like budget relief.

This raises the key question: how do we make it happen?

To solve this new workspace puzzle, many public sector organisations are turning to workplace tech to manage shared spaces. Far from being a free-for-all where employees simply turn up and work, workspace management systems are being used to provide real-time insights to ensure desks, meeting rooms, IT peripherals and other resources are available when and where needed. Alongside providing visibility, the insight from these systems is helping organisations to audit the success of cross-organisational working, and to help them plan for the future. Cross-organisational working and shared spaces are still relatively new concepts, and the public sector is working harder than most to ensure these first forays aren’t being taken blindly, or as a kneejerk reaction to the wider working world. But what is absolutely clear, is that they’re having a hugely positive impact, providing flexibility, security, improved productivity and an overall reduction in cost thanks to a consolidation of real estate.

Make the opportunity a reality

The public sector faces increased financial and service pressures during a period of unprecedented change. Sharing estates between the NHS and local authorities is not just a cost-saving measure – it’s a way to redesign services around citizen and staff needs. Vacant and underused buildings can be turned into connected hubs that improve access, reduce duplication and support integrated care with little to no detrimental impact to staff working practices.

To achieve this, estate leaders should look to embrace estate-sharing strategies and the technologies that underpin them. This is about more than balancing hybrid work with efficient estates. It is about building public sector estates fit for the future: flexible, shared and focused on delivering maximum value. Indeed, the UK government’s own local government reorganisation process highlights the importance of rethinking how councils use resources and estates, reinforcing that this shift is both a strategic and a structural priority.

Those who move early will set the standard – not just for the public sector, but for any organisation rethinking how its spaces can work harder.