The largest facilities management event in the world

The Facilities Show is the perfect opportunity to connect with over 250 facilities management suppliers to identify the perfect solutions for your business needs

Facilities Show 2020 and its co-located events, which were originally scheduled to be staged in May 2020, will now be held at ExCeL London on 8–10 September 2020. This rescheduling also covers IFSEC International, FIREX International and the Safety & Health Expo.

Discussing the rescheduling, Chris Edwards, Group Director at show organisers Informa Markets, said: “We have been closely following developments since COVID–19 began spreading, and we have consistently been mindful of its potential impact on global events like ours. By working closely with our venue partners ExCeL we have now been able to secure rescheduled dates for these events, which will now serve as an opportunity for our clients and exhibitors to regather in September—it gives the market time to recover as demand catches up. The rescheduled date provides clarity and ensures we have time and space to deliver the same fantastic event we promised, providing a safe and secure environment conducive to business, networking and career development for the health and safety and facilities management professions.”

Facilities managers as ‘key workers’

Linda Hausmanis, chair of the IWFM, recently wrote to the Secretaries of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, calling for workplace and facilities management professionals, and their contractors, to be recognised as key workers in the national effort to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

The facilities management profession has an essential role to play during the pandemic by ensuring that buildings, and their users, remain safe and operational. Despite this, workplace and facilities management professionals have not been recognised by the government as ‘key workers’. Her letter details what we consider to be essential services and safety-critical systems, such as cleaning, security, fire safety, and waste management, among many others.

It read: “Buildings enabling the provision of essential services that are so crucial in the COVID-19 response (such as hospitals, schools, banks, etc.) need to be clean, secure and well maintained to ensure they are safe for the people using them. Meanwhile, temporarily unoccupied buildings (such as closed down offices, hotels, etc.) and residential buildings still need essential maintenance, repairs and security to minimise any risk to user safety now and in the future, and to ensure business continuity. Water systems need E The facilities management profession has an essential role to play during the coronavirus pandemic by ensuring that buildings, and their users, remain safe and operational  to be maintained to avoid legionella, and refuse collection continued and telecommunications systems checked, for example.

The facilities management profession has an essential role to play during the coronavirus pandemic by ensuring that buildings, and their users, remain safe and operational

“As tighter measures are rightly implemented, these professionals (and their contractors) need to be able to continue to work, travel and access their buildings so that they may continue to provide the essential services and work that will keep people safe and enabled in their workplaces and homes. We acknowledge that such exemption has the potential to cover a significant number of people, so to minimise this we consider facilities professionals best placed to determine which of their teams and contractors are essential and necessary to uphold essential management, including critical maintenance and repair, and achieving safe and healthy outcomes.”

The Facilities Show

Facilities management underpins the dayto-day running of most organisations, but in the last 12-18 months the most prominent and reoccurring news stories all stem from facilities management work. Looking away from the Brexit issue, which will continue beyond the end of 2020, the issues of fire safety and building maintenance, climate emergencies and net zero public sector buildings, hygiene and the spread of coronavirus and ageing workforces can all find solutions in their facilities management teams.

Facilities Show is the world’s largest dedicated facilities management event, welcoming more than 12,000 global FM professionals to experience the latest technological solutions and hear from industry trailblazers - all under one roof, over three days. The event provides delegates with the chance to source and evaluate more than 2,000 products and solutions from top facilities suppliers

across cleaning, catering, lighting, field service management, removals and more. Additionally, visitors can access hundreds more products and seminars in eight co-located shows, including the Safety & Health Expo, FIREX International, and the Workplace Wellbeing Show.

Although half of respondents to a Facilities Show survey did view potential cost savings as a benefit of adopting sustainable practice, 65 per cent simply thought it was the right thing to do

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A survey of sustainability

Facilities Show 2020 asked almost 300 facilities managers to explain the importance of sustainability to their organisation. The results were enormously positive, with approximately 80 per cent of respondents declaring sustainability to be a major priority at board or departmental level.

Even more positively, sustainability isn’t just about cost savings and economic concerns. Although half of respondents did view potential cost savings as a benefit of adopting sustainable practice, 65 per cent simply thought it was the right thing to do. Indeed, when creating a sustainability strategy, just 62 per cent of respondents included economic sustainability, compared to environmental impact at 93 per cent and social responsibility at 85 per cent. This demonstrates that sustainability is seen as a positive for its own sake, rather than simply an economic concern.

Sustainability is also viewed as a key responsibility of facilities management teams: they are included in the drive towards better sustainability practice in some respect around 97 per cent of the time, having sole responsibility for 26 per cent of respondents. In fact, only seven per cent of respondents didn’t believe sustainability would become a high priority for FM teams in the next two years, while 64 per cent strongly agreed it would.

The survey also showed that respondents are, by-and-large, familiar with the core concepts of sustainability. The majority of respondents claimed to be familiar with ideas such as ‘net zero’, ‘BREEAM’ (a sustainability assessment method), ‘social sustainability’, ‘ISO 14001’ (the major environmental management requirement) and ‘carbon offsetting’, demonstrating the importance of sustainability in the day-to-day role of facilities management professionals.

Almost 60 per cent of respondents’ organisations employ sustainable procurement practices, with 26 per cent claiming they wouldn’t appoint any supplier that couldn’t demonstrate a commitment to sustainability. Indeed, 71 per cent would require—at the very least—a copy of a potential supplier’s environmental policy, with an incredible 30 per cent adding a sustainability policy, ISO accreditation, modern slavery policy, and proof of minimum wage compliance to that demand.

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