This webinar brings together leading voices from across the NHS and academia to share progress, practical learning, and honest insights into what it truly takes to reduce carbon emissions at scale.
View our Net Zero Strategy
What to Expect
The NHS has set a bold ambition: achieve net zero by 2040. But how do we turn strategy into action, across hundreds of sites, complex estates, and organisations facing significant operational pressures?
In this webinar, our expert panel will cover:
-
Progress so far against our Green Plan goals
-
What’s working across our estate
-
Lessons from technologies and trials, successes and setbacks
-
Key challenges, including funding, technology suitability and operational impact
-
Priorities and opportunities for driving system‑wide change
-
Interactive Q&A
This is an open and honest conversation designed to support anyone working in or with the NHS who wants to understand the barriers and breakthroughs on the road to net zero.
Meet the spekers
Mary Aladegbola, Senior Net Zero Technical Energy Lead
Mary is a Chartered Energy Manager with over 17 years’ experience spanning energy efficiency, energy management, and large-scale decarbonisation delivery across the public sector. Her career has evolved from technical energy management into senior strategic leadership, where she combines deep technical expertise with strategy development, programme leadership, and change management to support complex organisations in decarbonising their estates.
Mary brings a visionary, whole-system approach to accelerating decarbonisation, leveraging data-driven insight to identify, prioritise, and scale high-impact interventions. She is particularly focused on addressing structural and delivery barriers that constrain progress towards net zero, translating ambition into implementable programmes that are financially viable, technically robust, and operationally deliverable.
In her current role, Mary provides technical and strategic leadership on energy efficiency, heat decarbonisation, and carbon reduction programmes, working collaboratively across national, regional, and provider-level stakeholders. She plays a key role in supporting NHS trusts to develop credible, aligned decarbonisation programmes and in shaping the evolution of technical standards and guidance to ensure they respond effectively to the NHS’s net zero and climate resilience commitments.
Dr Esfand Burman, Associate Professor
Dr Esfand Burman is an Associate Professor at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering and the Institute’s Lead for Innovation and Enterprise. He is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), and a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (MASHRAE). His research interests include net zero carbon building design and operation, indoor environmental quality and health and wellbeing of building users in a changing climate.
Dave Percy, Operations Director
Dave Percy MRICS is Operations Director at Urban Design & Consult, where he leads the delivery of consultancy services across healthcare and the public sector. A Chartered Building Surveyor with over 20 years’ experience, Dave advises estates teams across NHS Property Services and primary care organisations, having supported the evolution of NHS estates since the transition from Primary Care Trusts.
Working closely with NHS Property Services for over a decade, he has helped shape and deliver consultancy services aligned to their operational requirements, with a strong focus on sustainability and environmental performance.
He specialises in delivering complex estate projects within live clinical environments, co-ordinating multidisciplinary teams and providing practical insight into the delivery of estate improvement programmes, including projects supporting NHS Net Zero initiatives.
Cameron Hawkins , Head of Energy and Environment
Cameron joined NHSPS as the Head of Energy and Environment in December 2018 to head up the Energy and Environment team. Covering utilities, water, waste and transport, Cameron’s objectives are to reduce the environmental impact of NHSPS’ operations, reduce costs and ensure compliance with environmental legislation.
Cameron brings vast experience in the energy and environment industry having most recently been a Director of Energy Management at a global real estate company, overseeing the implementation of energy and environment strategies at over a dozen global, EMEA and UK businesses. Prior to this, Cameron has switched between consulting on and project managing large energy efficiency projects from New Zealand to New York.
Simon Taylor, Director Estates Policy, Strategy & Capital Projects
Simon works with local and national NHS partners to develop asset, occupation, and investment strategies to improve how the NHS estate supports service delivery, in line with the NHS 10 Year Plan.
Before joining NHSPS in 2018, Simon supported the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the two property companies with the strategic estate planning programmes, supported Sir Robert Naylor in undertaking his estates review and to lead the combined DHSC sponsored Strategic Estate Planning team.
Simon has over 35 years’ experience working in the real estate sector, including over 10 years as Head of Property Strategy for Telereal Trillium where he provided estate transformation and delivery services to public and private sector clients.
Nick Macdonald-Smith, Net Zero Carbon Lead
Nick has been working in energy efficiency and sustainability in the built environment for the last 13 years both in consulting and in-house roles across engineering to property management organisations. He has been an accredited Energy Performance Certificate Assessor as well as a BREEAM Commercial Assessor in the past, and has managed portfolio wide certification programs for EPCs/DECs, Air Conditioning Assessments, BREEAM Certification and other mandatory and non-mandatory reporting requirements.
Nick is aware of the need to maximise the potential of the data we gather every day, but do not necessarily capture and analyse. The rise of Big Data and data analytics in the built environment is allowing better understanding of energy use and where the opportunities to drive large savings are in a large and diverse estate.
