NHS capital, estates and facilities teams are juggling ageing infrastructure, tightening budgets, and rising regulatory expectations. Here, Dr Carl-Magnus von Behr, co-founder and director of CompliMind (formerly Innex.AI), brings together two practitioner perspectives on the practical role of AI in everyday estates work. Paul Luxton, head of Acute Estates and Infrastructure at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, shows how AI can bring clarity and consistency to policy reviews. Paul Boocock, director of Estates and Facilities at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, reflects on how the same tools can support efficiency, governance, and workforce development at scale.
High-quality healthcare facilities underpin safe care, staff wellbeing, and operational resilience. Yet a large share of the NHS estate is ageing, and the maintenance backlog has climbed to £13.8 bn across England.1 The post-Grenfell regulatory landscape has intensified compliance requirements, demanding more rigorous documentation, reporting, and assurance processes from already stretched teams.
Workforce pressures compound the risk: around 34 per cent of the Estates and Facilities Management (EFM) workforce are aged 55 or older.2 The pressure on the workforce is already showing, with sickness absence in March 2025 averaging 6.57% for 'hotel, property & estates', higher than the 4.24% rate for 'professionally qualified clinical staff'.3
To overcome these challenges, EFM teams need protected time to reflect, collaborate and innovate. However, time is the scarcest resource. As shown in Figure 1, EFM staff spend about 9.6 hours each week searching for information, 3.7 hours reviewing, and 8.7 hours writing compliance and assurance documents.4 That is over 22 hours a week, close to 60% of a 37.5-hour week, absorbed by paperwork rather than planning, engineering and problem-solving. The opportunity is to streamline how staff find, assemble and check information so more of their expertise is applied to improving the estate.
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