University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 1)

This blog, kindly authored by Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant at SUMS Consulting, and William Phillips, Data Analyst at SUMS Consulting, is part of a three-part mini series on UK universities’ approaches to land use.

Today’s blog introduces the work.

Where we are

With the economic and policy developments of the last 18 months, the UK’s higher education institutions now face a heady mix of acute challenges and an emergent agenda around the contributions they are expected to make towards the country, its economy and society.

The sector is already seeing mergers, amongst a range of potential measures to reduce costs. That a prominent recently merged institution is keeping its constituent campuses is not really surprising: for most universities, their mission and even shifting identities are still broadly bound up with their location.

Over recent years, this has spoken to agendas such as the Johnson government’s “levelling up” or institutions’ own civic commitments. And place remains prominent in the current government’s Modern Industrial Strategy, in which Mayoral Combined Authorities will be central actors in integrated regional planning for many areas, and of course in the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper.

We know that universities are critical economic players nationally and regionally, due to their scale and the value created by their education, research and convening power.

We also know that universities cover a lot of space. A sense of this is reported in quant data terms each year in the (now voluntary) HESA Estates Management Record which, although it does not cover all providers, can be deployed for powerful analysis at the aggregate level.

How we use our land is a national question that cuts across a range of issues including economic development, food security and a healthy environment for people and nature, amongst many others.

These questions are about “where” as well as “how much”.

For university estates we have the numbers, but until now we have not had much of a sense of where certain things are, happen or could potentially happen.

We have sought to change that.

Mapping risks and opportunities

In our new report published today, we have used public and open-source datasets and methods to map the UK higher education sector for the first time.

Overlaying the boundaries for 174 institutions (those with data on Open Street Map) onto geospatial datasets (that is, datasets which contain a geographic or spatial component which brings the “where”) has allowed us to explore perspectives about universities’ estates and how they use them – which would not be possible without geospatial data.

The list of institutions, representing a mix of more traditional institutions reporting to HESA as well as some alternative providers, does not constitute the whole sector (or all of its known lands). But we believe the coverage is sufficient to allow for grounded discussion of sector patterns.

We explore the data over four strategic themes for institutions and at aggregate (sector) level:

1. State of the sector’s land
2. Risks
3. Opportunities
4. Value.

The report is accompanied by a mapping tool which allows user to explore these questions for themselves.

Purely in the direct financial terms we have modelled, “risks” and “opportunities” are to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds annually for the sector. And the wider dimensions of opportunities speak not only to universities’ contributions to environmental sustainability, but also to their role as critical players in regional economies and systems.

As such, this work has implications for a range of points in institutions’ thinking. These, of course, include approaches to risk, estates management, capital and strategic planning; but also core mission questions such as regional development, skills, innovation and industry partnership.

Over this series of blogs we will explore the strategic themes mentioned, starting today with the state of the sector’s land.

Due to the complexity of the topics involved, we have not been able to treat every risk and opportunity area in all the detail they deserve. But we do hope to inspire new ways of thinking about universities’ lands and locations and how these fit into their wider strategic context, including trade-offs and opportunity costs.

We also point to examples of institutions which are already engaging with these questions, to resources from sector organisations such as AUDE, EAUC and Nature Positive Universities, and to our own work supporting institutions across a range of topics relevant to this work.

State of the sector’s land

Our mapping of UK universities’ core estates covers a total area of 6,390.1 hectares (ha).

This does not cover the full extent of the HE estate due to limitations of the data available. (The 2023 HESA Estates Management Record reports a total of 7,293 ha “total grounds area” for 135 reporting institutions and a larger “total site area” – roughly the same size again – outside the core estate). But it does achieve more than 80% coverage of core estates.

While our mapped area constitutes just 0.026% of the UK’s land surface, it equates to a town the size of Guildford, Chesterfield or Stirling.

Of this area, 3,796.8 ha (nearly 60%) is built environment (buildings or artificial other surfaces), 1,893.6 ha (around 30%) is grass, 646.4 ha (around 10%) is covered by trees and 52.8 ha (a little less than 1%) is water and waterlogged land.

We also used machine learning to develop a typology of institutions based on their land use profiles. This identified three clusters of institutions, each of which stands out for possessing a higher proportion of one of the three core land use types (built, grass, trees) than the other two clusters.

• Cluster 1 (95 institutions, covering 1,205 ha) is highly urban, containing universities that are at least 80% and typically around 90% built land cover.
• Cluster 2 (60 institutions, covering 3,679 ha) is made up of universities with a relatively high grass cover (typically around 35%), still with a high built cover (around 58%).
• Cluster 3 (19 institutions, covering 1,506 ha) is comprised of universities that have a high proportion of non-built land (around 61%) and notably high tree cover (around 25%).

The various profiles of land use and institutions present different types of risks and opportunities, which we will explore over the coming days.

SUMS Consulting will host a webinar from 11:00 to 12:00 on Thursday 22 January 2026. The webinar will include a walkthrough of the report and online tool, and panel discussion featuring Nick Hillman OBE (Director of HEPI). Register here.