The local government thread running through UKREiiF 2026 is one of the more substantial parts of the programme. There is a serious attempt this year to address what local government is actually being asked to do, including growth, housing delivery, and placemaking, and what it needs to do it.
What I expect the most useful conversations to centre on is not the ambition itself, which is broadly shared and clearly stated, but the operational reality of delivering it.
What devolution is actually asking of local government
The devolution agenda has reshaped the context in which local government makes property and investment decisions. Mayoral combined authorities now hold powers and resources that sit well beyond what most councils can access independently. The expectation that those authorities will develop coherent growth strategies, attract private investment, and coordinate development activity across complex geographies is significant.
The honest version of that conversation acknowledges that the transfer of powers has not always been matched by a transfer of capacity. The skills, systems, and professional expertise needed to make strategic property and investment decisions at pace are not uniformly present across the authorities now being asked to exercise them. That gap is real, and it is not resolved by political intent alone.
The resource constraint that runs through everything
A significant proportion of the councils and public bodies I work with are navigating genuine resource constraints while being expected to move quickly on complex property and investment decisions. Those two things are in direct tension.
In-house property expertise has been reduced in many authorities over the past decade through a combination of financial pressure and recruitment difficulty. The institutional knowledge that supports good property decision-making is harder to maintain when teams are smaller and turnover is higher.
The consequence is that authorities are increasingly dependent on external advisers to supplement internal capacity, and that dependency creates its own risks if the advisory relationships are not well-structured or the right expertise is not accessible quickly enough.
What the best sessions at UKREiiF tend to have in common
The most valuable sessions at events like UKREiiF are consistently those where people say what is genuinely getting in the way rather than what they wish were getting in the way. Political constraints, organisational risk appetite, procurement rules, governance requirements; these are the actual friction points in public sector property delivery, and they are not always the ones that feature prominently in conference discussions.
When practitioners are direct about them, the conversations become more useful. That is what I am looking for this year.
Let’s meet at UKREiiF
Working through the questions that devolution and resource pressure are placing on local government property teams is not something that resolves itself in a conference session. However, finding the right people to think through them with is a good starting point.
If you are attending UKREiiF and want to discuss local government property strategy, estate management, or how devolution is affecting property decision-making in your area, let's arrange a meeting.
Contact me at [email protected] to set something up, or join us at our fringe event at the Black Cat Club for food, drinks, and a more informal conversation about the challenges facing public sector estates. Email [email protected] to register your interest.
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