In this issue of Healthcare Matters, we are pleased to feature Invida as our Industry-leading CAFM Software Company of the Month.
By Chris Butchart, Vice President of CAFM & IWMS, Invida
The NHS maintenance backlog now stands at £15.9 billion, up 15.7% in a single year. It’s usually quoted as evidence that estates budgets aren’t keeping pace with the problem. That’s true. But the figure hides something more useful underneath it.
The backlog isn’t one number. Under the ERIC return, it’s split into risk categories, from high through to low, and the high risk portion alone now sits above £3.5 billion. That matters more than the headline total. Two Trusts can report identical backlog values on paper and carry very different actual risk, depending on where that maintenance sits. A leaking roof over a storeroom and a failing electrical system in a theatre count toward the same total. They are not the same problem.
Ask estates leaders what’s actually driving the backlog, and ageing infrastructure comes out ahead of everything else, cited by around 63%, ahead of funding constraints at 53%. It suggests that even with more capital tomorrow, many Trusts would still be constrained by not knowing precisely how old, or how risky, each part of their estate really is.
That’s the second problem. The data behind most prioritisation decisions isn’t as solid as it needs to be. Roughly 1 in 10 FM professionals say their asset register is fully accurate, and close to a third still runs it from spreadsheets. If the register is unreliable, so is everything built on it, including the risk categorisation that feeds ERIC returns and shapes capital allocation. To give you a better picture of where this visibility gap tends to sit, we’ve put together a free guide, Taking Control of Your Estate, covering data silos, audit-readiness and a short self-assessment for your own Trust.
Managing the backlog means managing the data first
A Trust that can say, with confidence, ‘this is what is high risk, and here’s the evidence’ is in a fundamentally different position than one working from a register that hasn’t been looked at in eighteen months. It isn’t just about winning more capital. It’s about standing behind a prioritisation decision at Board level and answering the follow-up question in that same meeting.
This is where a single source of truth platform earns its place. At Invida, we model condition, age and risk against one underlying asset register, captured in the field through mobile survey rather than reconstructed from old paperwork. The numbers behind an ERIC return and a capital bid become the same numbers, so a Trust can move from a static register to a prioritised, evidence-backed plan, not three versions of the truth to reconcile first.
The part that gets overlooked:
Who actually owns the data
Here’s a question worth asking before you need the answer. If your Trust changed a maintenance contractor tomorrow, would you keep the full history of your assets, the condition surveys, the certificates, the job records?
For a lot of Trusts, the honest answer is no. That history often lives inside the contractor’s own system. The same exposure exists one layer up, at the software itself. If a CAFM or IWMS vendor’s ownership changes, some organisations have found themselves migrating onto a different platform, on someone else’s timeline.
None of this needs to be the case. It’s a structural decision, and it’s the one we designed Invida around from the outset. The Trust owns the data, the workflow and the record. Contractors work inside that environment under their own permissions rather than holding a separate copy of it, so a change in contractor or vendor ownership never costs you your own history. Backlog decisions stay grounded in continuous data, avoiding any likely data loss during handover.
Managing it on a budget that isn’t growing
None of this is much use if it prices Trusts out. Most estates teams are managing the backlog on a budget that isn’t keeping pace with it, so the software solving the problem shouldn’t add a second, unpredictable cost on top.
That’s why we price Invida as a flat, portfolio-based fee. One fixed cost, unlimited users, no per-transaction charges. Add your whole team, contractors included, at no extra cost, and no penalty for holding more data as your register matures, exactly the direction Trusts need to be moving in.
It also removes a quieter fear that keeps Trusts on ageing systems longer than they’d like: the risk of switching. Invida runs as a genuinely single-version SaaS platform, so every Trust is on the same release and new features arrive automatically, with no separate upgrade project or invoice. And because onboarding is delivered on a fixed fee, the risk of a slow migration sits with us, so nothing extra lands on your budget.
The £15.9 billion figure isn’t going to shrink on its own. But a Trust that owns its data, trusts its risk categories, and isn’t paying more every time it grows, is in a far stronger position to bring this down.
Visit our healthcare page to find out how Invida can help bring all your estate data into one place, for better visibility and better-informed decisions.
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