PAM 2025/26: what changed, and a week of board paper writing you can skip.

For most trusts, the Premises Assurance Model (PAM) has been a spreadsheet exercise rather than a compliance exercise. This year, that stopped being survivable.

PAM is the annual self assessment through which a trust tells its board and NHS England whether its estates and facilities functions are doing the right things in the right way.

The old method

An Excel spreadsheet with 700 questions is issued by NHS England, a PAM lead distributes sections by email, and weeks disappear into chasing and admin. Answers return without evidence; answers go largely unreviewed; and the trust has no clear view of its position until the workbook is complete.

The return then sits in a spreadsheet until the annual cycle begins again. Nothing compounds. As one estates lead put it: “Everyone has different spreadsheets everywhere.”

What changed in 2026

1. Binary scoring. A yes now means full compliance. A team delivering 80% planned maintenance may regard that as a good year, but PAM records it as a no (0%).

2. A rewritten question set. The return has grown from roughly 400 questions to roughly 700, with only around 110 comparable with last year. The workbook alone cannot answer whether performance is better or worse.

3. Evidence must be shown. It is no longer enough to know a policy exists somewhere. Current evidence, approval and audit trails must be producible when requested.

4. Every no needs a costed action. The response now needs input from finance and capital planning, not only estates.

5. Not applicable has largely disappeared. Some deliberate and appropriate omissions will still record as no’s and need explanation.

Why boards will see more red

The colour changed because the ruler changed, not necessarily because the building did. A binary, evidence-led assessment applied across 700 questions will expose partial compliance and dispersed records in a way the old return did not.

That is not a reason to minimise the red. It is a reason to explain it properly: distinguish genuine gaps from forced no’s, group issues by theme, show the costed route to improvement, and be honest that year on year comparisons are limited.

Why the spreadsheet now breaks

A spreadsheet cannot attach evidence to the answer it supports, track review, make ownership visible, or assemble a costed action plan while the return is open. An auditable evidence base cannot depend on a folder structure understood by one person.

How CompliMind responds

CompliMind is built around those operational failures rather than a single year’s question set. Evidence is linked to each answer. Responses can be reviewed before submission. Work is assigned instead of chased by email, and progress is visible throughout the cycle.

Every no can carry its own action and cost estimate, giving the board a plan rather than a list of problems. Answers, policies and evidence carry forward, so the next cycle begins with a review instead of a rebuild.

What users tell us

The first year still takes effort. “It’s a beast to feed and you need someone to do that”, one compliance lead told us. But they also saw the payoff: the policy uploaded this year is likely to be the policy needed next year.

An estates director put the outcome more simply: “We get loads of no’s, but we’ve got a costed action plan for next year.” Same estate, same red, a different board conversation.

The offer

If you have a fully populated PAM spreadsheet but have not started reformatting it, send it to us. We will turn it into a drafted board report within 24 hours on weekdays.

The draft will explain what changed in the model, why year on year comparison is limited, the no’s grouped by theme, forced no’s separated from genuine gaps, a costed action plan structure, and a clear decision request.

It will need your local context and judgement. We will use the file only to produce your draft and delete it on request.

Getting to a submission is the easy part. Explaining it to the board is where the work sits.