Estates, Facilities & Projects Appointments for UCL

About UCL

University College London (UCL) was founded in 1826 and is one of the world's leading multidisciplinary universities, consistently ranked among the top higher education institutions globally. It is home to more than 42,000 students and 13,000 staff from over 150 countries.

UCL operates one of the largest and most complex university estates in the UK: more than 200 buildings valued at over £2 billion, more than four million square feet of academic space and nearly 4,000 student bedrooms, with an Estates operating budget approaching £60 million a year. The portfolio spans the historic Bloomsbury campus, specialist institutes, teaching hospitals, research facilities, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park campus and international operations. Alongside running that estate, UCL is delivering a long-term capital investment programme valued at more than £1 billion.

An estate of that kind answers to academic departments, research groups, residential students and professional services at once, each with a legitimate and competing claim on the same buildings. That shapes every estates and facilities appointment UCL makes, from director level to the building-level facilities manager.

Our work with UCL

Maxwell Stephens has recruited across UCL's Estates and Campus Experience and Infrastructure functions over a number of assignments, including exclusive repeat work. The appointments covered here are:

• Director of Campus Infrastructure and Operations, Campus Experience and Infrastructure
• Director of Major Projects, UCL Estates capital programme
• Head of Facilities Services, soft FM across the UCL estate
• Performance Manager, UCL Estates
• Facilities Manager, a designated portfolio of academic and administrative buildings (exclusive assignment)
• Project Manager, UCL Institute of Education £55 million Masterplan, 20 Bedford Way

Executive appointments

Director of Campus Infrastructure and Operations

UCL appointed Maxwell Stephens to recruit a Director of Campus Infrastructure and Operations within its Campus Experience and Infrastructure function. The Director would set the strategic direction of campus infrastructure while leading operational estates and FM services across more than 200 buildings, keeping them safe, accessible, efficient and responsive to a diverse university community.

The brief covered campus infrastructure leadership, delivery of UCL's wider Campus Experience strategy, integration between Campus Experience and Infrastructure teams and academic departments, safety leadership, accessibility and inclusion, operational performance, sustainability, cultural change and senior stakeholder engagement. The difficulty is that the market splits: leaders who have run portfolios at this scale often come from commercial property, where the client is one organisation with one set of priorities.

We ran an extensive search across estates, property, infrastructure and facilities leaders with experience of large, operationally intensive portfolios, and assessed for the ability to turn strategy into measurable improvement. Many senior candidates present well on strategy; far fewer can describe how a plan survived a live building and a term-time constraint.

The appointed Director brought deep experience of large-scale property portfolios, a track record of driving cultural change around safety, a collaborative style that strengthened relationships between estates teams and academic departments, and the perspective to balance immediate operational needs against longer-term priorities on infrastructure, accessibility and sustainability.

Director of Major Projects

UCL asked Maxwell Stephens to lead the search for a Director of Major Projects to provide strategic leadership across its capital programme, in which individual projects are each valued at more than £100 million. Projects within the programme include:

• UCL East at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
• Institute of Neurology / Dementia Research Institute (ION/DRI)
• Project Oriel, the joint development with Moorfields Eye Hospital
• The Royal Free Hospital Hampstead Campus Masterplan
• The Bloomsbury Heat & Power Network Upgrade

The Director would operate at board level, represent UCL Estates on project boards and governance committees, act as senior escalation point for programme risk, lead procurement of consultants and contractors, drive a zero-harm culture and provide reporting and assurance to UCL's executive leadership, while managing relationships with NHS partners, government bodies, consultants and contractors.

The people best qualified for roles like this are almost never looking; they are usually mid-way through a programme elsewhere. We therefore ran a proactive headhunt supported by selective advertising: market mapping across higher education, healthcare, commercial property and major infrastructure, searches of our specialist network and database, direct approaches to passive candidates, competency-based interviews and benchmarking against UCL's long-term objectives.

Following a national search, we presented a shortlist of 11 senior executives, and the appointment was concluded.

Head of Facilities Services

Maxwell Stephens was appointed to recruit a Head of Facilities Services, reporting into the senior Estates leadership team and responsible for soft FM services across the whole UCL estate. The role carried leadership of more than 300 facilities management staff, substantial operational budgets, service strategy, change and service transformation programmes, statutory and health & safety compliance, and support for UCL's long-term Estates Strategy.

Soft FM leadership at this scale is a narrower market than the job description suggests. A front-line workforce of that size is visible, shift-based and distributed, so service quality is decided by supervisory culture rather than policy. Candidates who have only managed contracted-out soft services from the client side have rarely had to carry that.

We ran a targeted search across higher education, healthcare, commercial real estate and other complex operational environments, looking for proven leadership of large-scale soft FM operations, multi-million-pound budgets, consistent service across multi-site estates, large diverse teams, change programmes and strong governance. Each shortlisted candidate went through a competency-based assessment of operational experience, strategic leadership, commercial awareness and the ability to lead a large FM function.

The appointed Head of Facilities Services brought extensive experience leading FM operations in large, complex organisations, with a record of managing significant budgets, leading large multidisciplinary teams and improving customer service while driving continuous operational improvement.

Facilities and estates operations

Performance Manager, UCL Estates

To strengthen operational governance and decision-making, UCL appointed Maxwell Stephens to recruit a Performance Manager to build a performance management framework across the Estates division. The role covered KPI design aligned with strategic objectives, executive dashboards and management reporting, analysis of operational data to support investment decisions, benchmarking across Estates functions, and statutory performance reporting in compliance areas including asbestos, legionella and building safety. The postholder would work closely with Capital Projects, Facilities Management, Engineering and Finance teams.

The combination is the difficulty. Performance and business intelligence specialists rarely know what an asbestos register or a legionella risk assessment commits an organisation to, and estates professionals who do know rarely have the data discipline to build reporting that survives audit. A statutory compliance KPI that is technically wrong is worse than none, because it reassures the people who most need to be alert.

Working with UCL's senior Estates leadership, we ran a targeted search across estates performance management, FM information systems, business intelligence, KPI frameworks, asset and compliance reporting and data governance. Candidates were assessed on their ability to influence senior stakeholders and explain what a number does and does not prove, as well as on technical capability.

We placed an experienced Performance Manager with significant expertise in estates performance management, business intelligence and operational reporting, covering the Estates performance framework, KPI management and reporting, and compliance oversight.

Facilities Manager (exclusive assignment)

Having worked with Maxwell Stephens on a number of senior facilities management assignments, UCL again appointed us on an exclusive basis to recruit a Facilities Manager for a designated portfolio of academic and administrative buildings. The Facilities Manager would be the primary contact for building users and manage contractors and directly employed teams across planned and reactive maintenance, cleaning, security, portering and logistics, waste and recycling, mail services, grounds maintenance, car parking and catering support, while holding service standards, budgets and statutory compliance.

Building-level FM posts in higher education are harder to fill than the grade implies. The role is a generalist one among specialists, with little formal authority over the departments whose buildings it runs, so influence has to be earned through reliability.

We searched for candidates with multi-building operational leadership, experience of both contractors and in-house teams, compliance knowledge and experience in higher education, healthcare or similarly complex estates, and assessed leadership style and communication alongside technical competence. The appointed Facilities Manager has since maintained operational standards, managed contractors and internal teams, built relationships with academic departments and building users, and kept the portfolio compliant.

Candidate testimonial

"Maxwell Stephens have always provided me with a brilliant service. Every member of the team has taken the time to understand exactly what I was looking for and kept me fully informed throughout the entire recruitment process. Their interview preparation was excellent and I would thoroughly recommend them."

Project delivery

Project Manager, UCL Institute of Education Masterplan

UCL Estates embarked on a £55 million Masterplan refurbishment for the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), improving the condition, functionality and use of space at 20 Bedford Way and the surrounding satellite buildings, and upgrading infrastructure, welfare facilities and workspace allocation in line with UCL's Future of Work and its emerging Estates Strategy and Space Standards. The IOE was founded in 1902 and merged with UCL in 2014. 20 Bedford Way, designed by Sir Denys Lasdun and occupied since 1977, is Grade II* listed, which adds heritage constraints to any refurbishment. UCL asked Maxwell Stephens to find a Project Manager to help deliver the programme.

University refurbishments rarely have an empty building. Teaching, research and administration carry on around the works, and departments have to give up space, at least temporarily. The project manager needs as much skill in negotiation and stakeholder management as in programme control, so we focused the search on candidates whose experience covered space and staff planning, health and safety management and project coordination, not programme management alone.

The placed Project Manager brought strategic space planning across multiple departments, leadership of the internal contract compliance team, health and safety policy implementation and monitoring in line with statutory requirements, and project coordination using project management tools to track progress and deliver milestones. They worked with the Masterplan Project Lead, the IOE Director of Operations, the Technical Compliance Manager, Regional Directors, Managers and Property Managers, the Health and Safety Team and Approved Contractors.

The market for this role: university estates across England face a large maintenance backlog. The National Audit Office found that £5.6 billion would be needed to return all university-owned research infrastructure in England to a fully operational condition.

Why it worked

Each of these briefs was recruited against what the role actually demanded rather than against a job title. At director level, technical expertise is the entry requirement; what decides the appointment is whether the person can influence culture and turn strategy into performance that departments notice. For capital programme roles, the outcome depends on reach, because the people who have delivered at this scale are rarely applying. For performance, soft FM and building-level roles, it depends on testing the less obvious half of the brief: compliance knowledge in an analyst, supervisory culture in a soft FM leader, earned influence in a facilities manager.

Repeat and exclusive work adds a further advantage. Knowing UCL's estate, service model and decision-making allows a brief to be set accurately from the first conversation, and candidates to be told honestly what the job involves.

If you are recruiting a senior estates, capital projects or facilities leader, or an operational FM team for a large and complex estate, get in touch with Maxwell Stephens to discuss the brief.