The 3pm Sleuth

It’s 3:00 PM on a Thursday, and I’m on a Teams call discussing the ownership of streetlights entangled in a complicated lease renewal. This is the fourth time this week streetlights have crossed my desk. Who would have thought I’d ever have to become a minor sleuth on the subject? But that is the reality of estate management: you must become an expert on subjects you never previously considered “important.”

These particular lights sit on a single road in the South of England—one of roughly 1,000 roads I support across the country. If you asked me exactly how many streetlights I am responsible for, the honest truth is: I simply don’t know. No narrative exists yet to tell me that story.

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The Anatomy of a Road

In the UK, streetlight issues usually revolve around two questions: Who owns the road? and Was maintenance responsibility delegated?

When an organisation takes responsibility for a road, they generally take responsibility for all supporting infrastructure unless specific clauses in title deeds or leases state otherwise. While National Highways or local authorities maintain the vast majority of UK roadways, those on private land or other government departments are a different story. Ownership questions arise in the strangest of places.

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AM vs. FM: Knowing the Difference

In this instance, a lease renewal for circa 200 built assets identified anomalies in the title deeds that unsettled the legal team. The issue was promptly directed to my desk.

This highlights a key misconception: Asset Management (AM) and Facilities Management (FM) are not the same thing.

• FM is often about keeping the asset running and in optimal condition (the “doing”).
• AM requires us to consider the asset’s narrative: ownership, legal rights, and commercial redlines.

While the definitions of these roles often overlap in daily conversation, their professional objectives are distinct. The following table highlights the critical differences in focus, metrics, and authority between the two disciplines:

Feature	Facilities Management (FM)	Asset Management (AM)
Primary Focus	Operational Upkeep (“The Doing”)	Strategic Value & Narrative
Key Metric	Uptime & Service Response	Risk, Ownership & Lifecycle
Authority	Technical Delivery	Legal & Commercial Rights

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The DNO Hurdle

Ownership isn’t just a legal curiosity; it has operational consequences. My organisation did not own the land here but held responsibility for operational upkeep. This creates a hurdle when requesting power isolation for repairs.

Most Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in the UK require a letter of authority from the “Responsible Person” before actioning a request. Often, this isn’t the FM partner or the contractor; it is the legal rights holder. Without a clear narrative of ownership, the work simply stops.

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The “Art of the Possible”

I had no supporting data for these roads—a common “data gap” many of us face. However, when confidence in data is low, we look for the best available proxy.

Resource Spotlight:

Find My Street For anyone struggling with road responsibility, Find My Street is a brilliant free resource. You can search via name, postcode, or Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) to see who holds responsibility for a street and visualize its legal limits.

Using this tool, I offered an initial insight. It wasn’t a “perfect” answer, but it was the sum total of the art of the possiblein that moment. I could have stated we lacked sufficient data, but in a fast-moving commercial conversation, a supported “guiding hand” is often more valuable than a defensive “I don’t know.”

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The Takeaway

In asset management, you will rarely arrive at the perfect answer. Everything is a degree of compromise. The skill lies in understanding what level of compromise is acceptable for your specific situation.

This decision wasn’t the end of the story—it was the next iteration of a conversation that will continue through legal and commercial reviews. But once resolved, this element of the asset’s narrative must be captured and maintained to prevent this indecision from happening again.

The Narrative Brief:

• Data is rarely perfect.
• Asset Management rarely produces the “perfect” answer—and that’s okay.
• A broad understanding of diverse disciplines (legal, commercial, technical) is what distinguishes AM from FM.