So, if you’ve ever bought a fridge, or a hair dryer, or a drill, you’ll know that it comes with an efficiency rating.

Letters between A and G are used to denote just how power efficient your new appliance is. A better rating (A) makes it cheaper to run and thus even though the purchase cost may be higher the long term cost is lower.

Buildings have ratings like these too – in most of the UK these are Display Energy Certificates (DEC) for public buildings (and others if desired) and the broadly similar Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) for everyone else.

If you think back to new Association of Directors of University Estates (AUDE) chair Syd Cottle’s piece on Wonkhe you’ll know that estates directors have problems sleeping. Estates are expensive in many ways, while universities are seeing the value of their income dwindle, the cost of having and using buildings is growing.

If your estates manager can make your buildings more efficient in the way they use energy they would be very happy. More efficient buildings use less energy – thus less spending on energy, and lower carbon emissions.

You can get there in, broadly, two ways. The first is new buildings (“shiny” or otherwise). Designing from the ground up for energy efficiency is easy, but expensive. The second is maintaining and upgrading buildings you already own. This is hard, and also expensive. The bet the estates team is making is that this upfront cost is more than balanced by longer term savings.

Because you use capital for new build, but maintenance is a current cost, new buildings are a better bet when income is falling but the cost of borrowing is still cheap. There may be reasons that you might want to keep and update older buildings – they might be famous, or beautiful, or historic – but this choice represents an ongoing long term cost (for instance, 10-12 Downing Street had a DEC operational rating of E in May 2021. After a lot of work, including a brief dip to F, it was rated C in 2023-24).

You can actually look up the efficiency of pretty much any building via the gov.uk website. The Bodleian Library in Oxford, for instance, has a very credible EPC C. The University of Leicester’s Attenborough Tower has a hugely impressive DEC grade A. The main chunk of the University of the West of England Frenchay Campus (blocks A to E, plus the library and octagon) is rated DEC grade E.

HESA’s Estates data allows us to see the area (in metres squared) of residential and non-residential estates by DEC/EPC. What you’d hope for here is a gradual movement up the scale – as older buildings are upgraded or replaced. A warning sign might be a number of years without change, suggesting the estate is subsisting on basic maintenance only and storing up energy costs for the future.

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On the same dashboard I’ve let you see the number of sites a provider has. This is similar, but not identical, to the number of campuses: a site, here, is loosely defined as:

Sites should normally have a floor space of at least 1000 sq. m and would normally be at least 1km away from any other site. They should be physically and functionally severed from other sites and would not normally be single buildings. However, HEPs should return what they consider to be a site.

I’ve also given you the perennially interesting number of buildings a provider has, split into residential and non-residential categories. Yes, the University of Aberystwyth (Wales’ “University of the year”) still tops the charts with 443 non-residential buildings. However, I hear from the university that 166 of these are agricultural buildings.

Caveats

The Estates data release is very much the poor relation of the HESA open data series. Primarily used externally by AUDE, it is a non-required submission (to the extent that providers have to pay to submit), and data quality is not always as good as it could be. For this reason you can’t use totals or averages for the whole sector.

We’re also missing Table 5 for last year, but you can’t blame the Estates collection for that. Even though regulators are merrily using student number data, HESA isn’t allowed to publish any of the information on student numbers until 8 August.