National chartered surveying firm Bruton Knowles has been awarded a place on the £800,000 Citizen 2022 framework (0928) to deliver vital development property valuations over the next four years.
Professionals from Bruton Knowles’ National Teams — Utilities & Infrastructure, Valuation, Commercial and Building Consultancy — will support Citizen in assessing the viability of its development and sales requirements.
They will provide expertise on new, affordable and open market land and unit valuations, helping Citizen to determine whether its development and sales requirements for current and future assets provide best value for money.
Citizen has a clear social purpose as one of the UK’s most trusted social housing providers, which is to deliver homes that provide a foundation for life. Securing robust deals across all aspects of its operational activity is a top priority, because every penny is reinvested back into helping those most in need of a good home to thrive.
The organisation owns and manages 30,000 homes for diverse communities across the West Midlands, from urban tower blocks to rural villages and towns. It also offers support services to help people when they are facing the most pressing issues around housing and homelessness.
James Bailey, Managing Partner at Bruton Knowles, said: “We’re absolutely delighted to have been selected as one of six suppliers on this highly respected Citizen framework. The ethos of their organisation very much reflects our own ambition to collaborate with partners that prioritise social value and seek to give something back to society.
“We all have a role to play in ensuring a strong customer focus and an awareness of the wider issues facing our communities today. For us, delivering value is not just about cost, it is also about measuring scale and legacy in a more nuanced way.
“Our role is to ensure that land and property become assets for the people they serve. We’re looking forward to working closely with Citizen to achieve this objective whilst also enabling them to deliver their own commitments to their communities in the most effective way.”
With reforms on the horizon for UK procurement practices following Brexit, and Government’s proposals to scrap 350 of the most complex European Union (EU) rules, the landscape for organisations like Citizen who are wanting to buy in built environment services will soon become far easier.
The new Procurement Bill — expected to become law next year — will offer a more flexible and transparent approach, via a single framework, for securing public sector contracts going forwards. It will also place an even greater emphasis on delivering social value.
For organisations like Citizen, this will come as welcome news, because it means they can continue to focus on using every opportunity to deliver good outcomes for the people they serve.
For Bruton Knowles, as an organisation which adheres to the highest professional standards as a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ (RICS) responsible business framework provider, the reforms provide an even greater opportunity to obtain more balanced outcomes for clients.
James added: “The shift to a more sustainable future has to be driven from the top down. The proposed changes to the UK’s procurement rules present a real chance to embed sustainability right at the heart of the process.
“Simplifying the approach will also meant that state funded organisations can focus far more on the wider issues that really matter to their communities, because there will be fewer bureaucratic hoops for them to jump through.”
Bruton Knowles operates out of 10 offices across the UK. Those delivering services through the Citizen framework will be based out of Birmingham, a location which provides geographical accessibility to the West Midlands region that Citizen covers.
Header image ©Citizen Housing, show’s two of the HA’s staff with a resident outside one of the social housing provider’s schemes.
