New Alignments

This special issue of Facilities is about two conferences, five years apart. The millennium provided us with a unique threshold from which to take stock, to consolidate past achievements and to explore future opportunities. An international conference, “Futures in Property and Facility Management”, was held at University College London (UCL) in June 1999 in preparation for “threshold 2000”. The conference considered the strategic opportunities for property and facility management worldwide, bringing together senior facility professionals, service providers, property clients and academics to debate alternative futures. It focused on four themes; New Strategic Directions, New Performance Imperatives, Policy and Investment (PFI) and the promotion of Knowledge Exchange. The conference was a great success. Its purpose and products were summarised, first in a special issue of Facilities – “Futures in FM” (Nutt, 2000) and second, in the conference book “Facility Management: risks and opportunities” (Nutt and McLennan, 2000). This “Futures” conference was intended as a one-off “millennium” event. However, its success led to demands for further opportunities to progress the “Futures” theme. So this year a second conference, “Futures in Property and Facility Management II”, was held at UCL in London. The event was organised jointly by University College London, the University of Reading and the College of Estate Management. Again this was a highly successful event (Bell, 2004), attracting senior practitioners, academics and expert commentators to reconsider the future. Looking back over the five years that divide the two conferences we find that some of the predictions made in 1999 were highly optimistic, some over cautious. Some guesses were close, others wide of the mark. Much has been achieved. Much has changed and for the better. For example at the first conference, Adrian Montague, the chief executive of the UK’s Treasury Task Force, gave a keynote address on the government’s PFI Initiative. Since then, PFI contracts have proliferated at a rate and to an extent that was underestimated five years ago. While the jury is still out on the financial advantages and shortcomings of the PFI approach, its impact on infrastructure finance, facility briefing, the management of life-cycle value and service logistics is difficult to deny. Sir Crispin Tickell gave another of the keynote presentations at the first event. He set out the government’s concerns for sustainability, the initiatives that were underway to regenerate our urban infrastructure and facilities, emphasising the need for better design and better management of the environment. Some at the first conference thought that Sir Crispen was unduly pessimistic. Today the situation is clearer and rather stark. Most are now well aware of the urgent and critical environmental challenges that we face. Some