Active citizens ask councils for access to their land/buildings - but austerity is compelling a great sell-off
We don’t often run revelatory, protest-oriented news stories. We’re more interested in what people can build with each other, than direct their energies towards railing and waving their fists at an implacable system.
But this story - which we’re late to, but which is undoubtedly ongoing - is worth covering. This is because it closes off one possible positive route of connection between allies.
That is, between self-determining communities of action that require spaces and locations to build and concentrate their power. And local administrators (town, county or district councils) who possess buildings and land that could serve the needs of active citizens and commoners.
This won’t happen, however, if under pressure of funding cuts from central government, they’re having to sell off these public (and potentially commons-able) resources, to commercial developers. And this is the story we’re following.
The main report, jointly conducted by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Huffington Post in the UK, was alerted to us by Locality’s blog (Locality are running their own Save Our Spaces campaign):
Councils across the country are selling off hundreds of millions of pounds worth of public land and buildings just to make ends meet. In many cases, these sales are paying for council workers to be made redundant.
The Bureau sent out Freedom of Information requests to all 353 councils in England to bring data into the public domain that would otherwise not have been available. The list of lost community assets will ensure greater transparency about what has been happening at councils across the country in recent years. The findings reveal:
More than 12,000 public spaces have been sold, transferred or are otherwise no longer in council ownership since 2014/15, including libraries, playgrounds and day centres for the disabled.
We originally quoted £3.2 billion raised by councils from selling property during this period. In the context of the investigation, this only refers to councils that are making use of sales to pay for cost-cutting measures.
If we include all council property sales, the figures comes to £9.1 billion during that same period.
Before 2016, any money made from selling assets had to be reinvested into buying or maintaining new ones. Then the rules were relaxed to allow councils to spend the proceeds on cost-cutting measures which have upfront costs but reduce spending in the long-term, such as investing in new technology, or making people redundant.
Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Bureau found 64 councils in England – one in six – have spent a total of £381 million made from property sales using the new freedom since the policy came into effect. Almost a third of that – £115 million – was spent on making people redundant.
Over the three years since the rules were relaxed, the average number of redundancies was 75% higher at councils that made use of the new spending powers than at those which did not.
In Bristol, the number of council workers made redundant jumped ten times from 39 the year before the new rules were introduced to 401 the year after.
The Bureau have created an interactive map (scroll to the bottom) that allows you to put in your postcode, and discover how much public property your local council has sold off. (A/UK’s local council, Camden, has apparently sold off 32 spaces, reaping £236,227,158, between 2014 and 2018 - try it here).
If you seek a blame game… this is a complex matter. Given that cash-pressed councils were presented with new rules from central government that allowed them to spend on cost-cutting measures (like new technology), rather than just maintaining current assets, the logic they’re trapped in seems tragically constraining.
Our friend Rob Hopkins, in promoting his new book on imagination, is rightly praising the Belgian municipality of Liege (which we profile in this blog). Particularly for the way they have committed to putting the property they own, and regulate, at the service of Transition-Town-style businesses.
Their people-and-locality-centred practices are seen as more vital and flourishing by Liege’s mayoralty than the “smart city” or “culture city” model, most often promoted by the tech corporations and property developers.
We desperately need this level of municipal receptiveness to what we’ve been charting over these three years as a growing recognition of the power of localism and localisation. The peer-to-peer thinker Michel Bauwens calls this the “Partner State” - one that sees that all the best answers to the challenges of massive change will come from vigorous civic communities.
In lieu of any change in the UK coming from legislation, in terms devolving and subsidiarising power to the most appropriate level—we’re not waiting around.
Right now A/UK is talking to activists, eco-radicals, technologists and dynamic communities/localities themselves, about the kinds of “soft infrastructures” they could build, in the short term, to answer direct needs and requirements.
But it’s good to know, occasionally, both just how bad the existing system is. And also, just how materially supportive of a new or next system they could be, if the macro-conditions were less punishing and severe.