ACES Award for Excellence 2025

Alan Richards says:

Dear colleague,

ACES Awards for Excellence 2025

I am excited to launch this year’s ACES Awards for Excellence and have adjusted the categories for this year’s Awards.

I am keen that we create the opportunity for outstanding projects to be celebrated and showcased widely and to give ACES members the opportunity to submit projects that they have been involved in for consideration.

It is important to me, and to ACES That we recognise the diversity of projects our members are involved in and the fantastic work you do to deliver your organisation’s services and improve lives, the environment and our economies through the property, land and built environment.

The Awards for Excellence has always been a prestigious award and past recipients have been rightly proud and honoured to have their achievements recognised and promoted by the Association.

Now is your time to shine! To bring out those amazing pieces of work, to showcase how the property and built environment professions contribute to the public sector and wider society.

The Five 2025 award categories are:

Project of the Year:

We all strive to provide excellent asset management supported by our professional staff and to use land and property assets and our diverse skill sets to further the aims of our respective authorities.  This is an opportunity for exemplary work to be recognised!

FACES Award:

We want our established members to nominate early career team members, we want to hear about the amazing work being done in your teams by apprentices, graduates, APC candidates and those in the early years of their professional careers, as well as new entrants to the profession. We also want to hear about great examples of early career development and progression programmes/initiatives so tell us about yours!

Team (or Branch) of the Year:

Where would we be without our people? Teamwork and putting our people first makes everything else work well. We want to hear about your teams, whether they are organisational teams, project teams or even your ACES regional branch so we can recognise and reward their achievements.

Climate resilience:

This category is wider this year and may include not only outstanding net-zero projects but wider climate resilience initiatives whether that’s energy generation, water management or natural environment based, we want to hear about it.  We are keen to hear about projects delivered in your organisation or with partners which contribute to a decarbonised public estate or wider environmental objectives.

Community Impact:

This is where you showcase the social value of your projects, how did you maximise community engagement? Have you been delivering locality hubs, rationalisation projects which do more with less, are you supporting community volunteer days or working with contractors to drive value from contracts in new and interesting ways?  Big or small we want to see excellence in engaging with and working communities to deliver more from our built environment.

In addition to this year’s Awards for Excellence, our President, will present the ACES President’s Award for exceptional contribution to ACES.

The rules:

• Nominations can only be made by working ACES members for projects, teams or individuals within your scope of work as property professionals.
• You can nominate for more than one category.
• We encourage applications that show partnership working and demonstrate strong community engagement.
• The deadline for receipt of entries is Friday 29th August 2025 – they should be emailed directly to me at alanrichards@southend.gov.uk

The nomination process:

Making a nomination is easy. The guidance and nomination form are attached.

The more nominations I receive the better – it means our celebration of everything we achieve in the sector will inspire others and will give Betty more material for the Terrier!

The winners will also be invited to present their entry to an ACES event in 2026, and may even feature in the Terrier or at the national conference!

I look forward to celebrating your achievements at the National AGM in November 2025.

Alan Richards

Senior Vice President 2025