Senior advisory and delivery support for public investment, capital programmes, and place-based delivery.
PlaceSense works at the intersections where places are made or lost
Between policy and delivery.
Between public and private.
Between local and national.
Between the organisation and its projects.
These are the places where investment decisions stall, programmes lose momentum, and funding approvals either land or quietly fail.
PlaceSense works with local authorities, housing associations, cultural institutions, arm's length bodies, devolved government, and the private sector partners working alongside them. The work spans the full range of public investment: Green Book business cases, programme mobilisation, governance design, and strategic procurement advisory.
Policy and delivery
Strategies don't deliver themselves. The gap between policy intent and operational reality is where good programmes go wrong. Our founder has made that full journey: writing the guidance, building the process, making the decisions, and living with the consequences. That's what PlaceSense is built on.
Public and Private
Public clients and private partners too often talk past each other. We know both sides of that conversation from the inside: local government, central government, major contracting, global consultancy. Knowing what each gets wrong about the other is what makes the difference between a procurement that finds the right partner and one that doesn't.
Organisation and Project
The hardest failures aren't external. They happen when the organisation loses grip on its own programme: the wider change management never quite aligning with the capital project, accountability diffusing across too many layers, nobody clearly responsible for the outcome. PlaceSense helps senior responsible owners re-establish that grip before the programme stalls or a funding decision goes the wrong way.
Local and National
National policy needs local delivery. Local ambition needs national support. We translate between them; not just in how programmes are managed but in how they are framed. The right frame often makes the difference between a project that stalls and one that secures the support it needs.
What this looks like in practice
The work PlaceSense does sits across four areas: portfolio strategy and capital programme leadership, investment governance and funding approvals, rapid programme mobilisation, and strategic bid and procurement advisory.
Most engagements draw on more than one of them. There are three ways to work with PlaceSense: a focused sprint to address a specific question, an ongoing senior advisory relationship, or a partnership arrangement for consultancies and contractors who need specialist capacity within a wider engagement.
Andrew Alsbury - Founder
I've spent twenty years inside the system: writing the policy, building the process, making the decisions. I know what the guidance doesn't tell you.
That career has taken me across the whole system: local government, central government, a national contractor, a global consultancy. I've authored public investment business cases and sat on the approving side. I've mobilised national capital funds and built the governance that kept them honest. I've helped private sector organisations understand how public clients actually make decisions, and I've helped public clients design procurements that find the right partner.
I founded PlaceSense because that breadth of perspective across public investment, programme delivery, and place-based policy is genuinely rare; and genuinely useful at the moments that matter most. Clients bring me in not for theory, but to help them make the decisions that unlock funding, momentum, and delivery.
Selected Experience
Building Safety (MHCLG)
After Grenfell, I worked at the centre of the national building safety response. I helped develop the evidence-based guidance issued to building owners and worked directly with the Expert Panel and the Industry Response Group.
When the £1bn Building Safety Fund was announced, I had six weeks to build the eligibility framework, design the assessment process, and open it to applications. Over the following eighteen months I reviewed around 1,300 fire safety reports and approved eligibility for 981 buildings. In the four months after I left, no further approvals were made, despite no change in the underlying pipeline. The process was intact. The willingness to decide had not carried over.
Department for Education
The state of England's school estate wasn't being taken seriously at the centre.
I delivered and analysed the results from Europe's largest condition survey: 18,830 schools. The data reshaped how senior officials understood the problem and became the foundation for successive rounds of national school investment.
National Galleries Scotland
A national collection facility was struggling to make its case as an art storage problem. I reframed it around cultural access, regional equity, and the regeneration of Granton. The reframe is what unlocked the funding. The Scottish Government allocated £56m in the Spending Review.