One Public Estate Programme

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered One Public Estate.

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.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

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?

[Matt Western]

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

“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.