Sustainable built asset management performance indicators and attributes: A UK social housing case study example

Purpose: This paper aims to identify key performance indicators (KPIs), and their corresponding attributes, required to successfully manage asset management sustainably in a built environment context. Improving the sustainability of existing housing stock is a major challenge facing the UK social housing sector. There is a lack of support to navigate the growing and often incongruent information relating to sustainable development and how to operationalise it. The problem is twofold; first, the current (single criterion) condition-based approach to maintenance planning constrains asset managers and does not fully address the social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainability. Second, the toolkits available for assessing the sustainability of housing are often generic and are time consuming and expensive to implement. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reports the findings of a participatory research project with a leading London-based housing association, using a series of landlord and tenant workshops to derive a set of attributes associated with KPIs to fully reflect the local requirements of the landlord and their interpretation of the sustainability agenda. Five KPIs are considered to be measurable, directly affected by maintenance work and independent of each other were identified by this landlord (comfort, running costs, adaptability, maintenance costs and community). Findings: The resulting outputs, in a policy context, will provide a clear route map to social housing landlords of how to improve the sustainability of their housing stock with the additional benefits of addressing fuel poverty and carbon emission targets, whilst at the same time, help create and maintain housing in which people want to live. Originality/value: The proposed approach is flexible enough to incorporate the individual requirements of landlords and be able to adapt to changes in government policy (local and central) in a timely, robust, transparent and inclusive format.