About 75,000 public assets, worth about £15bn, have been sold by English councils since 2010, in part to plug holes in their budgets, research by IPPR has found.
An average of 6,000 council assets – such as playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs and swimming pools – worth £1.2bn have been sold each year in the past 13 years, the thinktank estimated, through analysis of government data and statistics from a freedom of information request.
By contrast, the research estimated just 2,500 assets came newly into community ownership during the same time.
The research comes as Birmingham city council said it would sell further assets as part of an attempt to get its finances back on track, despite having sold more assets than any other council in the nine years after the start of swingeing government cuts to council budgets in 2010.
A change in the law in 2016 meant councils no longer had to buy new public assets with money made from selling them and instead could use the money to make up for shortfalls in funding.
The government is taking over the running of Birmingham council, which serves more than 1 million people and has a budget shortfall of £87m for the current financial year, projected to rise to £165m in 2024-25.
The IPPR is calling for fairer funding from national government to ensure areas that need investment get it, and “participatory budgeting” so that communities can decide how money is spent in their area. Currently, only 1% of budgets are spent this way.
It is also calling for common good property registers to increase transparency of public asset ownership to help to protect communities from continual losses. This would work alongside support for communities to regain assets.
The IPPR and IPPR North launched a research report on Wednesday called Parallel Lives: Regionally Rebalancing Wealth, Power and Opportunity, which involved speaking to citizens of Hastings, Redcar and Stoke-on-Trent about the need to “patch up the holes in a threadbare social safety net”.
A Stoke-on-Trent resident who participated in the project said people in the town needed to be empowered. “I just think that the people who live in it should be the people who are given the opportunity to have a say on how to transform it, and how to better it. It’s all very well politicians from London having a say on our situation, but they haven’t walked in our shoes,” they said.
Zoë Billingham, the director of IPPR Northand report co-author, said: “People have lost far too much over the last 13 years. Communities have lost billions worth of public land and buildings in their areas, local safety nets are crumbling all whilst government plays fast and loose with major regional infrastructure projects.
“People want and deserve better than this. They want functioning public services, to receive a fair share of investment and to restore pride in their places. Regional rebalancing must be reprioritised by central government and through support of regional leaders who continue to champion the agenda locally.
“It’s time to rewire the status quo so that wealth, power and opportunity can be accessed and shared by everyone, in the places they live.”
A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: “Councils are best placed to manage their own finances and prioritise depending on local needs – they know their areas best.
“Through the 2023-24 local government finance settlement, the most relatively deprived areas of England will receive 17% more per household in available resource than the least deprived areas.
“In our landmark levelling up white paper, we committed to restoring a sense of community, local pride and belonging, especially in those places where they have been lost.”
• This article was amended on 21 September 2023 to add a comment from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
