I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing me to bring forward this debate. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Paisley.
I have secured this debate because I believe it is important to review programmes and policies and, as far as I can see, there has been very little scrutiny of the One Public Estate programme since its launch some six years ago in 2013. It was launched by the coalition Government, largely in response to their priority of reducing the deficit. Although I acknowledge that ambition, my great fear is that we are witnessing a wholesale asset stripping of the public estate with very little public or central Government scrutiny.
However, I appreciate that the programme’s aim was just as much to seek to join up central Government, local government and other partners to make better use of public assets and their land. The idea was that by public partners sharing space, running costs could be reduced and surplus assets sold to generate money or released for other purposes to create new jobs or homes. In fact, the programme had three core aims: to create efficiencies, generating capital receipts and reducing costs; to create local economic growth, creating new jobs and homes; and to deliver more integrated, customer-focused services, providing citizens with better access to Government.
My interest in securing the debate was motivated by my own time as a councillor on Warwickshire County Council, and by a local project involving new offices for Warwick District Council, my local authority, which I believe could have made use of the One Public Estate programme. It is also motivated by my wider interest, which many will know of, in housing issues and particularly social housing. I will outline the aims of the programme when it was first launched, provide my own assessment of its success and perhaps unpick some of its failures, particularly in relation to housing.
Launching the policy in 2014, Francis Maude, who was a Minister in the Cabinet Office in the years 2010 to 2015, outlined the impetus for the programme thus:
“In the absence of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy, central departments and their arms-length bodies all did their own thing.”
He continued:
“They did it without talking to each other and without thinking about their local partners.
Because no one was looking at the bigger picture, departments would take on expensive new leases when government freeholds remained under-used—or where local authority accommodation was available just down the road.”
I will come back to that point and illustrate it with a local example. Later in my speech I will also return to what Mr Maude was saying in 2014, as I think his words were particularly significant. They are certainly eerily apposite to the case of Warwick District Council, my local authority, and its proposed self-described new headquarters building in the centre of Leamington.
There was merit in Mr Maude’s approach, and I applaud his thinking at the time. For example, the notion of providing services in one place as opposed to several could better serve the public by providing easier access to local government and other public services. The obvious example would be a jobcentre sharing space with a council’s welfare and housing team.
In its initial trialling in 2013, the programme focused on 12 councils. It has since expanded rapidly so that just over 300 councils now participate, representing 95% of all English local authorities. The One Public Estate programme also works with 13 Government Departments and hundreds of health and blue light organisations. It works by providing a combination of central Government grant funding directly to partnerships, which have to bid for it, and expertise that local authorities and other public bodies do not always possess.
The purpose of the funding is to cover up-front costs associated with getting a project under way and to unlock those potential assets, for example through remediation works on land that could be used for housing. One Public Estate has also formed a partnership with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to jointly administer the Government’s land release programme, which is designed to release land for 160,000 homes on Government land and a further 160,000 on local government land by 2020. That was formulated back in 2017.
There have been some successes through the programme. In my assessment, the aims of One Public Estate are, in the main, laudable. As someone who spent part of my career bringing change to an organisation, I wholeheartedly support the programme’s aim to rationalise the use of public assets to reduce the cost to the taxpayer, and to provide Government services in a more joined-up and accessible way. In fact, shortly after the programme’s national launch, I proposed a “one Warwickshire estate” programme as a county councillor. I could see that the county and district councils in my community could make much better use of the land and buildings they owned to serve each other’s needs.
Across the country, there have clearly been some successes, albeit limited ones. The most impressive is that to date the programme has created 5,700 jobs, and the latest phase is expected to create a further 14,000 new jobs. That is a tangible benefit for people up and down the country. To date, it is estimated that running costs associated with partner projects have been reduced by £24 million, and the new phase is expected to save taxpayers £37 million in running costs. However, I point out that, while any saving to the taxpayer is positive, £24 million over five years is relatively small beer compared with the overall cost of Government.
There are individual cases that will bring big benefits to their local communities. Looking through the various materials available on the programme, I see the development of public sector hubs, if done in the right way, as a positive step forward. The West Suffolk partnership is currently developing such a hub, which will have space for a school, leisure facilities including a swimming pool and health centre, children’s centre, public library, jobcentre and citizen’s advice bureau, as well as space for Suffolk police, West Suffolk Council and Suffolk County Council. That will surely benefit how the local community interacts with the public sector, and the project is expected to reduce running costs by £4 million to boot.
Another example is in Cornwall, where the police, fire and ambulance services have co-located in a new joint headquarters in Hayle, saving £500,000 a year on running costs and releasing two sites for redevelopment. The new facility has enabled the emergency services to reach many more people within the target response time. Since the success of that first tri-light co-location, Cornwall partners have progressed to a number of further blue light property co-locations and piloted emergency services collaboration, with tri-service offices being rolled out across the county.
I mentioned that Warwick District Council, in my area, has been seeking to build itself a new office. I do not believe that is necessary, because there is ample vacant or void space in the county council offices, just two miles up the road. I will come back to that a little bit later.
There have also been failures of the programme. Perhaps the greatest failing of all has been the wholesale disposal of public land, ignoring the greatest crisis of all—the need to deliver much-needed public housing. That is my greatest concern because, to paraphrase, “They don’t make land any more,” and, together with its people, public land is a community’s greatest asset.
We are in the midst of a serious housing crisis: 277,000 people are homeless and 1,157,000 households are currently on the housing waiting list. There is a clear and urgent need to house people who are at the sharp end of this crisis, but we also hear from older constituents who are renting privately and unable to afford their rent—a problem that will only increase. It is estimated that by 2040 up to one third of 60-year-olds will be renting privately. We also know that many younger people are trapped in the private rented sector.
One of the major barriers to providing housing is land. Sky-high land prices are preventing local authorities from gaining access to land to build on, and those prices are incentivising cash-strapped councils to sell off the land they own rather than build on it.
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He talks about social housing, and there are five major cartels in this country that the Government should tackle. They get involved in what I call land banking, for want of a better term: they get outline planning permission, and then they sit on the land until it becomes more valuable. Then, of course, house prices in the private sector go through the roof. Does he agree that that is one of the big problems that should be tackled?
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point: this is an oligopoly, with just a few players controlling our land. I increasingly see local authorities coming to arrangements with the big players and developers, and that prevents land from being used wisely to deliver the sort of housing that we need.
With such a colossal social crisis before us, we should use all suitable public land to build high-quality social rented council housing, without exception—not 50% here or 40% there, but 100% of such land. I fear—with good reason, it seems—that the One Public Estate programme was designed more to incentivise the public sector to sell its precious land as part of a national asset-stripping programme than to use the opportunity so afforded to design in a more efficient delivery of public services or facilitate the building of social rented housing, which would be of most social benefit to most communities.
A relatively small number of homes have been delivered by the OPE so far: just 303, which is a failure in itself. Overall, the land released will enable the building of a further 2,550 homes, with an estimated 10,000 more homes over the next five years. It worries me that I cannot find the data on how many of those homes will be social rented, or even affordable—I suspect most are not—or how much of the land has been released to local authorities to build council housing; I suspect most has not. It would be helpful if the Minister provided the data today.
I do know, however, that the Government’s estate strategy revealed that around £2 billion has already been generated from selling more than 1,000 buildings in the last four years, with £164 million in capital receipts from land and property sales raised as part of the OPE. How much of that land could have been suitable for delivering the social rented council housing we desperately need? In truth, any such need, or means of facility to meet that need, has been fundamentally undermined by the prevailing attitude that public sector assets and land are best released to the private sector. I think it is fair to say that that was the view of what is now seen as a surprisingly neoliberal coalition Government. In the speech that I referred to earlier, Francis Maude went on to say that
I spoke to the Minister this morning before the debate. Does the hon. Gentleman believe it is important that there is a purpose behind the sale of any land, such as saving money when Departments come together? Equally important, as he outlined, is the need to ensure that, whatever land becomes available, there is a social housing requirement to give those who do not have the same assets the opportunity to buy or rent houses. In Northern Ireland, we had a suggestion—not a rule—that developers should set aside 10% of land for social housing. Does he feel that the Government should look at something more objective for the mainland, with land set aside in law for social housing? Does he think that might be a way of retaining land for social housing? People cannot get housing if we do not give them the opportunity to do so.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention—I think it was an intervention—and he makes a valid point. There is a huge need to legislate for this, as I have identified, with 1.2 million people in homelessness. We have a massive social crisis because of the land banking that is going on across the country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) said. We saw that yesteryear with commercial land, when the big supermarkets just took up options, and now we see it with housing developers and home builders, who have a huge number of options across the country, in Northern Ireland and here on the mainland. They control the prices, the roll-out and the build of housing in this country, and they allow to be built what is viable for them, in view of the profitability that they want to achieve.
In Amsterdam, all housing projects have to deliver 80% social housing. Whether it is 10% or 40%, or whatever the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, we have to choose, politically, the right figure. I want the figure to be 100%, which is the way the Dutch authorities are looking to go in Amsterdam. That is what we need, because we have such a crisis. The Shelter report from January on the need for social housing identified that we need to build 3 million social rented properties in the next 20 years—155,000 every year for the next 20 years. That is why we should use all this land to realise its greatest value, which has to be in its social value, not simply in the financial receipt.
To summarise, let me be clear: I support the overall aims of the One Public Estate programme. It has been important in trying to achieve a change in the mindset of those in the various public sector authorities and our Ministries to try to deliver better outcomes. Its simple approach of seeking to establish a partnership model across the sector was, and remains, right. The simple idea of mapping the public estate and understanding, through audit, what is out there and what we have that local authorities and others can use; the establishment of a strong governance mechanism, with representation across the public sector, which is vital in driving delivery; and the engagement of public sector partners as early as possible, to ensure that a project meets the needs of local communities, are all creditable and right. When delivered effectively, it can produce savings to the taxpayer and, most importantly, improve local services, but I am absolutely not convinced that that is happening as widely or as openly as was originally hoped.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on such a superb and powerful opening to the debate. In particular, he made the case for social housing and the importance of 100% social housing and affordable housing on the sites released by Government. If he will excuse me, I am going to take a slightly different journey and talk about the opportunities for release of public land in relation to creating jobs, which is an essential part of creating the fairer society that we want to see.
This speech will be an unashamed plug for Plymouth. As many people who have heard me speak in this place will know, I am very proud to be a Janner, very proud to be from Plymouth, and the experience that Plymouth has had, the journey that it has been on, can tell us a lot about One Public Estate and how it fits with other Government programmes and, in particular, the Government hubs programme, which I think has a good opportunity to create jobs in my part of the world.
I was intending to spend a bit of time talking about how fabulous the far south-west is, until I saw the new Minister in his place. I believe that, as the hon. Member for Torbay, he may have an inkling of just how fantastic a part of the world the far south-west and, in particular, south Devon is. I know that he knows Plymouth very well.
I want the Government to start realising at a faster pace their ambition to move jobs out of central London and into the regions, in particular those regions that have missed out on many of the large Government relocations in the past. The far south-west, and Devon and Cornwall in particular, is one of those areas with an appetite for greater investment. There is a willing and skilled workforce who can support our public sector objectives, and there is an opportunity, using the lower land costs, to realise benefits for the taxpayer in terms of not only output, but economic activity and cost to the taxpayer.
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that he is now going down a route that is particularly advantageous for other parts of the United Kingdom, in terms of not just developing social housing but the economic benefits that can be derived by Government looking at disposing of surplus land—land that will not be required over the next 10 or 20 years—but that that requires intensive consultation with local communities to arrive at the conclusion that he and I seem to draw?
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The important points are what Government land is disposed of, how it is disposed of and where the benefits of that disposal flow. We have seen in Plymouth, a city with a very large military pedigree and current military role, that many of our former armed forces bases have been sold off, but the benefits of the sale have been taken to the Exchequer in London and not delivered to the communities that previously gained employment and investment and a sense of identity from those military bases. I think that there is an opportunity to use much of the surplus land, which is owned by a cohort of public authorities—ranging from the Ministry of Defence and all the weird and wonderful MOD agencies, through to Plymouth City Council and different parts of the Government estate—and to bring services together. If the Government are to realise their ambition of moving from 800 to 200 Government offices by 2023, the idea of creating a Government hub in the far south-west, in Plymouth, where we have already shown, through the Land Registry and previously the Child Support Agency, that civil service and public service jobs can thrive, is a good opportunity.
We lost out on the Marine Management Organisation towards the end of 2010, and many of us in the far south-west still talk about how we lost out on the wealth tax agency in 1979. We were scuppered by the election of a Tory Government who perhaps were not too keen on creating a wealth tax agency—who would have known?—but there is now a real opportunity, and if you will forgive me, Mr Paisley, I will talk for a few moments about Plymouth’s One Public Estate journey.
The unlocking of South Yard in Devonport has been an incredible success. That surplus land owned by the Ministry of Defence was not being used for Royal Navy purposes. It has been repurposed as Oceansgate and, through the One Public Estate programme, is creating new marine jobs. Plymouth has a huge opportunity in marine science and marine engineering, and Oceansgate is helping to unlock that. It is taking far too long to overcome the logistical barriers between the detail of what the MOD might want and what businesses might want, but that challenge can be overcome.
In Northern Ireland a very different approach has been taken. The Government policy is to turn former Army barracks into intergenerational places, where the community and the economy can come together, where businesses can build and where councils can be involved. That is all happening on Army bases. In other words, the benefactors are the communities of all sides. That was an opportunity we have used in Northern Ireland. Perhaps they could do something similar where the hon. Gentleman lives?
Order. I feel that the hon. Gentleman has a speech waiting to get out of him today. I am tempted to put him on the notice paper, whether he wants to or not.
I take what the hon. Gentleman has said. In Plymouth, although we are better known for the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, we do have an Army base at the Royal Citadel. One of my frequent concerns about the defence disposal programme is that the MOD maps have a red line drawn around the site, and that is the land chosen to be disposed of. We need to take a much more holistic approach and ask about the needs of the wider community beyond that red line and what benefits can be accrued for it, especially when it comes to disposing of Ministry of Defence bases, with which the local community’s identity and employment opportunities are often so intricately involved. I encourage the Minister to speak to his MOD colleagues about that.
Although One Public Estate has had many failures, it has also had some successes. I encourage the Minister to keep tweaking those elements that are not quite right and also to unblock the decision-making process that is delaying the relocation of civil service and public service jobs from central London to the regions. My sense is that there are decisions waiting to be made and announced that could have a profound and positive economic effect on the regions, especially in the far south-west. I encourage the Minister in his new job to give the cage a bit of a rattle, to see if we can accelerate some of those decisions, because there are jobs to be created, value to be restored and money to be saved for the taxpayer. I also encourage the Minister to look at that wider opportunity of creating more affordable homes and decent jobs.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) for opening the debate in the way that he did, looking at not only his local perspective, but the national perspective of One Public Estate. It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). I concur with him about the opportunities the regions provide in departmental change and bringing those vital jobs into the region. I look at York and its connectivity: with the upgrade of the east coast main line, it will be just over an hour and a half out of London—and what a fantastic place to live, rather than in the heart of this city, in order to facilitate many of those vital public functions.
Today, I want to reflect on some of the disposals of public land that we have seen in York and highlight a particular problem, which I trust the Minister will look at. First, to give a tour d’horizon on what has been happening, we have seen the disposal of many public land opportunities in York, and, unfortunately, it being placed in the wrong hands as a result of that. For example, Strensall barracks and Imphal barracks have been earmarked for closure under the better defence estate strategy, by 2024 and 2031 respectively, but the Government need to remind themselves that the Army has resided in York for over 1,000 years and that those sites provide vital jobs not only for the armed forces, but for civilians—the people of our city. Over 600 civilian jobs will be lost as a result of those closures. Just up the road, RAF Linton-on-Ouse is also earmarked for closure.
Such land is then put into the local plan, but it will not come forward within the time framework. Therefore, there is real concern about how this is being used to lever in the local plan, as opposed to looking at the real challenges of the local housing environment in particular. The council has earmarked most of this land for housing, but not the vital social housing that my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned and that we desperately need in York, which has had one of the lowest levels of social housing build in the country. Instead, the land is being earmarked for the developers, who clearly just want to make a profit and to take advantage of those opportunities.
It is a great honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) for securing the debate and making an excellent case, which stems from his vast experience in local government in his area and as a member of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) and for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for their excellent contributions, which demonstrated the vast reach of the public estate strategy and its local effects.
On the face of it, the One Public Estate programme appears to be a positive, sensible strategy to reduce waste and get the most out of our public assets, as I expect the Minister will say. Its stated goal of unlocking land to increase house building is commendable, as estimates have put the number of new homes needed in England at between 240,000 and 340,000 per year, but worryingly, on recent estimates, the Government’s target of 300,000 homes annually is already under threat and could take 15 years to achieve. Let us not forget that over the last two years fewer new social rented homes have been built than at any time since the second world war.
To face that challenge, central Government must take a sustainable and transformational approach to resourcing local authorities to provide the homes we desperately need, but the Conservatives have comprehensively failed to do that. The strategy, which is effectively austerity by the back door, sells public land and property for quick cash under the illusion of helping to solve the housing crisis. It is not only disingenuous, but kicks the funding can down the road, rather than confronting the serious realities head on.
I say that the policy is disingenuous because the Government’s figures show that One Public Estate has released land for the development of just over 3,000 new homes, and the public land for housing programme has released land with capacity for fewer than 40,000 homes. That is some way short of the programme’s ambition to release surplus public sector land for at least 160,000 homes by 2020, just one year away.
I call the Minister. You have lots of time to answer all these questions.
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“we want to release property back onto the market”,
and that the Government
“identified assets which could be released between now and 2020, generating £5 billion for the taxpayer.”
To be fair, it appears that this Government’s priorities have changed from those of the coalition Government. The Prime Minister has claimed that austerity is over, although the public are yet to see any evidence of that. She has also claimed that she wishes to solve the housing crisis, naming it the Government’s No. 1 domestic priority. Indeed, the borrowing cap has been reformed so that councils can begin building council housing at scale again, but a cap should never have been imposed in the first instance. I therefore urge the Minister to look again at how the One Public Estate programme operates, in terms of releasing public land, and to shift its priorities so that public land that is suitable for the development of social rented council housing is prioritised for that purpose, instead of being flogged off to the highest bidder.
The defence estate optimisation programme provides a very good example of the potential of OPE, but also its failings. The Ministry of Defence currently accounts for 2% of the UK’s land mass. The Government recognise that many of those sites could be better used, particularly for housing, and the Ministry of Defence therefore plans to release around 90 of its most expensive sites before 2040, potentially releasing land for 55,000 homes. That relies on linking up the Ministry with the relevant local authorities and providing them with the up-front cost and expertise needed to make the most of the release of those sites. The OPE is well placed to fulfil that role; indeed, it is already involved in discussions relating to 12 of the sites.
However, if we dig slightly deeper, we see that the opportunity for mass social rented housing programmes on that land is being totally missed. For example, St George’s barracks in Rutland is due to close in 2021, and the master plan that has been developed provides for 2,200 homes as part of a new garden village. The OPE programme was awarded £175,000 in December 2017 for project management, consultation, surveys and master planning of the barracks site—so far, so good. However, when we delve into the master plan, we see that only 30% of the homes will be affordable. Worse still, of those, 50% will be affordable rent, which we all know is not that affordable; 35% will be starter homes or other affordable home ownership products; and 15% will be rent to buy. It appears that none will be social-rented housing—a prime example of a fantastic opportunity missed for OPE and genuinely affordable housing.
I can only draw on my own experience in Warwickshire and with my local authority, Warwick District Council, where there has been no real appetite to exhaust the options of sharing assets. We still have in Warwickshire a police headquarters and a fire headquarters, and both are on prime land. There is considerable opportunity for a master plan to improve the delivery of services while enabling the best use of assets for the public purse. The Suffolk example that I gave earlier is a positive example of what can be achieved.
I think, however, that there are examples across the country of asset stripping, and of the wholesale industrial sell-off of land. My fear is that there is not, through the Public Accounts Committee or through this place generally, proper scrutiny of what is going on, even though billions of pounds of public assets are in play. I would urge the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy to be more closely involved.
In my own investigations, I realised that one particular company was involved with my local council, Warwick District Council. Called PSP—Public Sector Plc—it is, I discovered, involved with 22 different authorities across the UK. I understand that it has not followed a procurement process, yet it is advising and involved in the disposal of these assets. Surely CIPFA and others should be looking at that. I believe that the Government Property Agency should be looking at it, and so should the Public Accounts Committee.
We should focus on the ambition, which is the utilisation of the assets for the maximum possible benefit in our communities, and on how we realise true social value. In practice, that means a shift in the programme from delivering as much money as possible—the highest receipt—through the sale of assets, to releasing land for local authorities to deliver the best services, the best joined-up practice and high-quality social rented council housing so that we can finally get to grips with our housing crisis.
I look forward to hearing the contributions of other hon. Members and that of the Minister, but I urge us all to think about our most pressing need, which is to deliver low-rent social housing. Only public land can deliver that.
We know that, on average, good-quality, affordable business premises in Plymouth and the far south-west are about a third cheaper than similar properties in many parts of the south-east. Considerable savings can be made when we look at costs in central London in particular. I think that the principles behind the One Public Estate strategy support moving more jobs into the regions. Programmes that channel funding and support through councils to deliver ambitious property-based projects tend to work best when there is opportunity, land and a real willingness and drive to do that. The opportunity to work more with local councils should be a thread running through this debate, because from the initial small cohort of councils when the One Public Estate strategy was first formed, we now have, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington said, nearly all English local authorities involved, and entrepreneurial, innovative local councils are driving forward very interesting and beneficial property development.
OPE 3, 4 and 5—the funding streams—have helped us to develop our integrated health and wellbeing hubs. There is huge potential here. We have spoken about some of the big, aggregated services, but GP surgeries, mental health support, sexual health testing and social care can all come together at a much smaller, micro level. Indeed, I would encourage the Minister to have a word with his new colleague the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy), about the super-hub project. Plymouth has applied for funding from the Department of Health and Social Care for that project, which would bring sexual health testing, an eight-to-12-chair dental surgery—enabling dental students from Plymouth’s superb dental school to learn and help to treat people in some of the poorest communities in the city, right next to the city centre—directly employed GP surgeries, mental health support and health and wellbeing services all into one building, at Colin Campbell Court, which the Minister may know well. There is a huge opportunity there. Part of the One Public Estate strategy has to be to mobilise and motivate other Departments to make decisions that might be slightly off their usual funding streams if there is an opportunity from doing so.
The other aspect that I would like to mention relates to the better defence estate. My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington spoke passionately about some of its successes and some of its failures, and we have had a similar journey in Plymouth. There is the success of relocating the Royal Marines from Royal Marines Turnchapel. Releasing that land and creating what is now a world-class centre for autonomous marine engineering has been a huge success. The new base at Royal Marines Tamar, at the very north of Devonport, has been an incredible success for the Royal Marines. It gives quick and easy access to the Tamar and, through that, to Plymouth Sound and to the training facilities at HMS Raleigh and a superb new state-of-the-art facility for our Royal Marines there.
However, there have also been failures from One Public Estate, and that has largely also been about the Royal Marines, in relation to the closure of Stonehouse barracks. There has been an attempt to rationalise that defence estate by closing the spiritual home of the Royal Marines—the only purpose-built barracks for the Royal Marines that are still in use. Those barracks are not fit for purpose. There is no hot running water in many of the accommodation blocks; the showers and the heating do not work. We should not accept that for our Royal Marines when they are at home. Many of them would accept that when on deployment, but not at home.
Now that we have seen the Government U-turn on their commitment to build a superbase in Plymouth, which would have brought the Royal Marines to our city, I would be grateful if the Minister encouraged his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence to look at how the programme for relocating the 3 Commando Brigade from Stonehouse barracks to a new purpose-built facility can be accelerated. The new date of 2028 means that our Royal Marines will be waiting a long time to have hot water in their accommodation. I think we would all agree that that is unacceptable.
There is an opportunity to create a new Government hub in Plymouth, bringing together civil service and public service jobs from the centre of London to create a new, superb facility in Plymouth. As the Minister will know, Plymouth is a centre that can create jobs not only within Plymouth and the PL postcode boundary, but for the wider Plymouth travel-to-work area—or perhaps the greater Torbay area, depending on one’s perspective—to help us create wider economic benefits for our region. There are many failings of the One Public Estate strategy.
In addition, we have seen the closure of the post office in our city, which again is a detrimental step, and I do not believe that that is going too well for the Post Office, as we forewarned. The York Central site is the biggest development site across the whole of Europe. It is a brownfield site that has lain dormant for 30 years. We are eager to see it developed, but, regrettably, the council handed over power and control to Network Rail, which clearly is disposing of as much land as possible. We just need to remind ourselves of the sell-off recently, which was identified as a financial loss by the Public Accounts Committee. Over 2,100 luxury flats are being proposed for the site, but that is not what our city needs, because the housing crisis in York is around family housing and social housing, which are hardly getting a look in at the site.
I ask the Minister to look at this issue—I will be meeting with his colleague to discuss it—because the site’s economic opportunity is being lost, sixfold or sevenfold. In York, we have a low-wage and quite insecure economy, so to throw away that opportunity in the heart of our city, right next to the railway station, is a serious detriment. Therefore, we have asked for the decision to be called in and are waiting for a response from the Department. Clearly, we want to see the maximum economic opportunity being brought to our city, as well as housing need being addressed. On the transportation front, too, using current data in the analysis would have helped to show how we need to change what has been proposed.
I want to focus on Bootham Park Hospital in York, which opened in 1777 and closed in 2015—the doors were shut only three days after the inspection. That caused much harm in our city. It was a mental health hospital, but I concur that the site itself may not be suitable for modern-day provision of mental health services. However, I would like the Minister to respond on what happened to that site.
The local authority was working with the local trust, the clinical commissioning group, the sustainability and transformation partnership and other public services, which came on board to formulate what opportunity that site could provide for our city. Analysis was undertaken, particularly looking at the opportunity around healthcare, but also wider services. For instance, the police and crime commissioner identified that this would be an ideal location to place a women’s unit in our city.
I have to say that the progress of One Public Estate in realising the site’s potential was slow, but the local authority was even slower in identifying, with NHS Property Services, that it wanted to utilise the site for the benefit of the city centre. Much of the site cannot be developed, because under its trust status it has to remain as parkland, but land at the back of the site can be developed. Needless to say, the beautiful building is listed, but in need of much repair.
The site for the clinical commissioning group costs £100,000 a year just to maintain and keep open. Those charges are to the detriment of the strapped-for-cash clinical commissioning group, which is one of the worst-funded in the country, so it is eager to move the process forward. However, the NHS Property Services timescales for the disposal of the site did not meet the One Public Estate process, so my plea to the Minister is to ensure that there is synergy in the timescales that are being executed in how sites are developed and the opportunity that realises for the city.
From my meetings with the former Health Minister, the right hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay), it seems that NHS Property Services determined that it wanted to dispose of that site at the earliest opportunity. However, it would not wait for One Public Estate’s fully worked-up proposals. Therefore, it disposed of the site to a private developer, which is going to build—guess what?—more luxury apartments in the heart of our city. The developer is also looking to build a hotel and high-value older people’s accommodation, as opposed to addressing urgent need.
The site is uniquely placed next to our acute hospital, which is on a cramped campus without room for expansion. The hospital is bursting at the seams and has been challenged by winter crises. The only opportunity for that hospital to expand is the Bootham Park Hospital site. Indeed, it had ambitions to do so to provide better access to the site and to provide other vital services, such as physiotherapy. Furthermore, it proposed to extend hospital parking facilities and other services on to the site.
Vitally, the site was an opportunity to provide housing for key workers, which has been identified as a real need. We have more than 500 vacancies for NHS staff in the city, and that crisis is worsening. York’s expensive property prices are one reason for that, so the opportunity to provide key worker housing on a site in close proximity to the acute hospital was necessary, but the loss of another opportunity means that the acute hospital’s agency bill will be higher. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington said, the financing with respect to the disposal of such sites does not come back to the city; it goes to Departments, so there is no benefit to York. We will not see that money again, even though we have a real crisis around health services.
I have looked at the evidence base behind the One Public Estate bid. The York Teaching Hospital, the Humber, Coast and Vale sustainability and transformation partnership, Vale of York CCG, York Medical Group and the city council were looking at the opportunity to utilise the site for public benefit, but that has been denied and overridden, and it has been sold to a private developer. That will certainly not enhance our city, because it will put more stresses on the public services in our city, not reduce them.
The opportunity that has been passed up was for the development of 147 homes, which York needed; 52 key worker houses; a physio suite, which I mentioned; medical training; a research centre; a 70-bed care home; 60 assisted living and supported living apartments; a children’s nursery, which our hospital does not have and which would have been vital; public parking for use at the acute hospital; and a new public park for York in the heart of our city, where there is one of the highest levels of premature mortality in the city and where people should have the opportunity of some open green space.
Going back 100 years in York’s history to the time of Joseph Rowntree and others, there was real recognition of how to build a humane city and move it forward, but those opportunities are being passed up due to the greed of private developers that want to maximise their profits and cram the most expensive properties into the heart of the city. As I have explained, the people of York do not have the resources to purchase those properties, so they are being pushed further and further away from the city. Therefore, the social engineering that is taking place is to the detriment of local people across the city.
The city is becoming hollowed out, as private apartments are being built. Some people perhaps depend on utilising our public services at weekends, but we cannot afford the people to work in those public services. Therefore, the whole city is being put out of kilter and skewed with respect to needs. With the connectivity that I mentioned, it is clear that people now see York as being in the commuting zone of London and cities across the country, which puts more stress on our city.
My request to the Minister is that he look at the situation with regard to Bootham Park Hospital, where one Department is not talking to another and the local need is not being addressed. A massive public consultation exercise is happening about the Bootham Park Hospital site and on the York Central site, although we have not got to that point in the process with Imphal barracks. The Government say that they respond to and recognise the value of the voice of the community, so why is that voice being completely ignored through the disposal of such sites? I believe it needs to come forward.
In York, we have launched a “Public Land for Public Good” campaign. We need to ensure that there is a public good test in all planning decisions, so there is an enhancement of the way that land, which we know is incredibly precious, is utilised, as opposed to giving profit to developers. Frankly, the people of our city are angry about that, because they are losing out on the opportunity for vital jobs and services, and even a home. I ask the Minister to respond to those points, and I trust that he will take them back to his Department and that we will see real change.
The idea that this strategy and programmes such as One Public Estate are even scratching the surface of the housing crisis is total fantasy, yet the bigger question remains unanswered: why are public land and property being handed over to private developers in the first place and why are they being sold at a discounted price? Shockingly, analysis by the National Audit Office shows that of the 1,500 or so sites released by Government between April 2015 and March 2018, 12% were released for £1 or less. Let me get to the central point: such is the scale of the challenge, and the consistent failure of the market to tackle it, that we must look at empowering local authorities and housing associations to use public land to build the affordable housing this country desperately needs. Not only is that the best strategy for tackling the housing crisis, but it provides a way for the public to share in any rise in land value, as the Institute for Public Policy Research and others have pointed out. The Opposition oppose the strategy of flogging off public assets for developers to provide insufficient housing.
The Government must be called out for missing their own targets. I ask the Minister, how many of these homes built on public land are affordable? When it comes to central Government land sales, remarkably, the Cabinet Office does not analyse data at the programme level to assess the use to which the land is subsequently put, but let me help the Minister out. Thanks to research by the New Economics Foundation we know that only 20% of new homes built on public land will be affordable. That is simply not good enough.
We know that one of the main reasons that this figure is so low is the fact that developers are able to exploit section 106 loopholes and ride roughshod over desperate councils, leaving the public ripped off. We must also ask why local authorities are signing up to programmes such as One Public Estate, because they know such programmes will reduce the land and property they use for essential services, which are assets that might not be needed today, but may well be needed tomorrow. Indeed, much of the land and property sold under One Public Estate and other programmes is needed, despite the rhetoric around reducing waste. As the National Audit Office report said, many sites identified for disposal are still being used by public bodies to provide services.
How have we got here? Ultimately, because for almost a decade our hard-working local authorities have been forced to implement the Tory austerity agenda. Under the Conservatives, local authorities have faced a reduction to core funding from the Government of nearly £16 billion since 2010. That means councils will have lost 60p of every £1 that the last Labour Government provided to spend on local services. With a £3.1 billion shortfall in funding, many councils are funding essential services or redundancies by the quick sale of their property portfolio for good. The scale of this is staggering.
Research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that £2.8 billion-worth of local authority-owned assets were sold between 2014 and 2018. In 2016, the Government said that they expected local authorities to sell assets with a value of £11.7 billion by the end of this Parliament. That same year, the Government passed legislation to allow local authorities to invest the proceeds of assets sold by April 2019 in transforming frontline services. Just how low will this Government stoop? They have decided that the right way to fund social care, youth services, libraries, bin collections and road repairs is not by reversing their tax cuts for millionaires or clamping down on tax avoiders, but by forcing local authorities to sell their assets—assets owned by the public—while further inflating private developers’ profit margins.
If we needed yet another reason to show that this is a Government for the few and not for the many, here we are. For the public, this is a ticking time bomb until the day local authorities have sold assets they will one day need. The housing crisis remains and local authorities have run out of family silver to sell to raise funds. The Tories know exactly what they are doing: forcing councils to implement austerity, leaving them no choice but to sell public assets such as libraries, youth centres and playing fields—assets our most disadvantaged people rely on—to fund vital services.
One Public Estate is part of a strategy that has been rumbling on for many years in different forms. Local government now owns just 40% of the land it owned a few decades ago and the NHS has seen its estate reduce by 70%. As our population grows, as demand is loaded on to local authorities and as our housing crisis deepens, what will this Government say when they have run out of public assets to sell, and their great housing remedy has produced only a few thousand extra affordable homes? I suspect they will not say much at all.
One thing is blindingly clear: this scheme and others like it do little for families who are desperate to exercise their right to an affordable home or for those who rely on public services. They do very little for our councils, which deserve fair funding, not schemes to encourage asset stripping. Our message to the Government is clear: stop messing about, confront these big issues head on, own up and admit that this strategy is really austerity masquerading as partnership and a house building strategy.
The public deserve far better. They deserve a Government on their side, standing up for the public good, building homes, funding and improving their public services, and unashamedly putting the many in this country first. We will make those honest, bold and fair decisions to fund our councils and build the homes we need. We have that plan; it is fully costed, fully transparent and exactly what the next Labour Government will deliver.