Facilities Management
Serco is one of the largest facilities management providers in the world. Our proven experience and broad capabilities help our customers manage and improve their infrastructure, respond to emergencies, monitor and manage their facility resources, and keep their facilities safe and secure.
Facilities Management
Serco has more than 50 years’ experience delivering facilities management services in secure environments around the world.
From correctional facilities to immigration centres, to military and defence bases, Serco helps governments meet the demands and challenges of managing complex operating environments.
We bring unique benefits to our customers by combining deep facilities management experience and capability with market-leading technology to provide a cost-efficient solution. This is underpinned by the provision of rich management information produced by the market-leading systems and technologies that we employ. Serco's best-in-class facilities management services are designed around our customer's needs using our standardised service streams as the building blocks. This means we offer our customers a flexible and adaptable service while delivering in a standardised way, leading to greater efficiency, reliability, and customer experience.
Facilities management statistics:
- Serco provides 18 separate facilities management service lines to Australia’s largest prison, Clarence Correctional Centre in NSW.
- Since 2009, Serco has provided facilities management services to secure onshore immigration detention centres in Australia. At its peak, this network comprised 23 sites around the country.
- Serco has managed more than 150,000 facilities management tasks in our immigration and justice facilities since 2015.
- 3,000 Facilities Management work orders are processed each month by Serco’s National Operations Support Centre in Canberra.
- Serco has a proud 50-year history delivering complex facilities management support to RAF Fylingdales for the UK Ministry of Defence. Serco is the only contractor to have continuously operated and maintained the facility, despite 11 competitive tender exercises.
- Serco maintains more than 4 million square metres of grasslands, turf, and median strips for the City of Melbourne.
Our capabilities:
Infrastructure
• Asset lifecycle management • Energy and utilities management • Configuration and design support • Emergency management • Business continuity • Compliance management
Buildings
• Estates and portfolio management • Maintenance and Repairs • Cleaning and catering • Pest control • Security and access control • Helpdesk services • Minor capital works • Project Management
Open Spaces
• Horticultural services • Buildings and infrastructure services • Cleaning, rubbish and recyclables • Water management services • Minor capital works
Facility snapshots:
Clarence Correctional Centre
Serco, as part of the Northern Pathways consortium, was selected by the NSW Government in 2017 to deliver the new Clarence Correctional Centre, a $4.1 billion PPP. Serco is the managing contractor for the operation and maintenance of the prison and a contributor to the centre’s design to ensure optimal asset performance. Serco is responsible for the delivery of all FM services at the prison, including a wastewater treatment plant. Serco is delivering 18 separate FM service lines, including responsibility for 63 buildings with a GFA of 91,799 square metres across 481 acres, as well as over 3 km of secure perimeter.
Throughout the design and construction phase, Serco developed several innovations based on our experience in managing large secure environments:
- A zero waste to landfill philosophy, equipping the centre’s two waste facilities with the necessary equipment and infrastructure to sort and bail the recovered resources for subsequent sale.
- Sensor-less daylight harvesting by utilising daylight modelling created during the design phase of the project. This will ensure that artificial light is firstly step dimmed, then modulated throughout the day to account for natural sunlight entering each space. Modelling indicates that this will reduce power usage by 1,029MWh per year, subsequently removing 16,860 tonnes of CO2 emissions over the life of the contract and deliver significant savings to the forecast replacement rate of light fittings.
- Serco is working with the Queensland University of Technology to use the data collected from the centre’s 24,000 HVAC data points to develop a framework that utilises analytics for automatic detection of anomalies, to support maintenance and life cycle replacement decisions.
- Serco’s experience at the Clarence Correctional Centre has shown the value of developing highly detailed building models with federated services linked to each asset’s meta data during the design and construction phase of a project. The development of such models and information is increasingly important to those involved in the ongoing operation and maintenance. By allowing the infrastructure owner to operate and maintain their assets in accordance with PAS 1192-3 (2014) ensures the best possible future opportunities to harness innovations in data, machine learning and Building Information Management modelling.
Adelaide Remand Centre
In March 2019, Serco was awarded the contract to operate and maintain the Adelaide Remand Centre (ARC) for the South Australia Department for Correctional Services. This facility is located in the heart of Adelaide and initially accommodated up to 274 remand male prisoners.
Serco and the Department for Correctional Services were faced with an extremely tight timeframe for the transition project, only five months, with operation handover to Serco required by 14 August 2019.
In addition to capacity challenges, part of the old prison infrastructure was not compliant, posed a safety risk to prisoners and was therefore in need of urgent upgrading. Immediately following operational handover to Serco, construction of a significant cell upgrade program to bring all cells up to Safe Cell compliant standards commenced. The upgrade focused on improving safety and security while allowing increased opportunity for out-of-cell time for education, training and development, and other factors that help in reducing reoffending.
Importantly there was the removal of all ligature points within cells and the replacement of 41 single bunk beds with double bunk beds, replacement of porcelain hand basins and toilets with stainless steel Combi units, replacement of vinyl flooring and fibreglass shower cubical with epoxy flooring and epoxy wet areas, and installation of new sanitaryware and fittings such as taps, showerheads, mirrors and pinboards.
Serco and construction partners managed the infrastructure improvement whilst maintaining a safe, secure and operational remand facility. This infrastructure work was also completed prior to the deadline, allowing the Department for Correctional Services to complete their final commissioning inspections by 19 December 2019.
Now complete, the cell upgrade has enabled the Adelaide Remand Centre to operate safely and securely at full capacity and deliver cost-savings to the South Australian Government, while helping to reduce reoffending.
Acacia Prison: Managing the state’s largest capital project undertaken inside a secure facility
Acacia Prison is the second-largest correctional facility in Australia, accommodating up to 1,525 medium-security, convicted male prisoners.
Located in Western Australia, Acacia opened in 2001 with an operating capacity of 650. Serco has managed the facility since 2006 and has successfully overseen a number of periods of expansion to create one of Australia’s largest prisons.
In 2011, the Western Australian Department of Corrective Services (DCS) was facing an increasing prisoner population, coupled with budgetary pressures and a commitment to reducing the reoffending rate. Serco proposed to the Department that Acacia could be optimised by a build program incorporating additional accommodation and activity spaces. The Department of Treasury Western Australia and DCS committed to invest over A$100 million in an expansion to the facility, which would increase capacity by almost 50 percent and deliver an additional 387 beds.
The project was the state’s largest undertaken inside a secure facility and required robust planning and co-operation between the Department, Serco and the construction partner to ensure that safety, security and care was appropriately maintained throughout the three-year build period.
The Western Australian Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services noted: “The scale, impact, and risks of the expansion could not be underestimated. The project was equivalent to building a prison within a large, fully operational prison and was on a different scale to other infrastructure projects conducted previously.”
Serco worked with the Department during the planning of the expansion, to ensure the design maximised operational and rehabilitation outcomes, and would address the needs of distinct cohorts of offenders. The result was a new 220-bed young adult offender unit, additional self-care accommodation units for 168 prisoners, new education and vocational training facilities, a refurbished and expanded healthcare centre and a commercial-grade hospitality training suite.
The Western Australia Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services said Serco and the Department “engaged intelligently and productively” during planning, and that the collaboration “was good practice, resulting in the much more effective development of a valuable state asset”.
In 2015 more than 700 prisoners were transferred into the new facilities without incident and ahead of schedule. Serco tested and commissioned all new buildings and recruited more than 120 staff to support the expansion project.
In 2016 Serco was awarded a five-year extension of its contract with the Department.
Immigration Facilities Network, Australia
Since 2009, Serco has provided FM services to Australia’s rapidly evolving network of on-shore Immigration Detention facilities across the nation, in close partnership with the Department of Home Affairs. The number of sites operated has ranged from a high of 23 facilities in 2012, down to a recent low of eight sites, with a further three under renovation by Serco.
The FM services we provide include fixed plant and equipment maintenance, infrastructure and facilities maintenance, condition appraisal and inspection, compilation and maintenance of asset registers, works programs, cleaning services, waste management, utilities management, grounds management, and calibration, modification and repair services. Delivery of these services is managed by Serco’s national Operational Support Centre in Canberra, which provides 24/7 coordination of in-house resources and subcontractors.