Overview
On average more than 4,000 publicly owned buildings and spaces in England are being sold off every year. We’ve launched Save our Spaces, a campaign to save our much-loved publicly owned buildings and spaces from being sold off for private use.
Locality submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to all councils in England to try and get a better sense of the problem.
We were shocked to learn that on average more than 4,000 publicly owned buildings and spaces in England are being sold off every year. That’s more than four times the number of Starbucks in the UK. This is a sell off on a massive scale.
Read more about it in our new report ‘The Great British Sell Off’.
Related reports
The future of community asset ownership
Our public buildings and spaces are vital; whether they are local libraries, green spaces or community centres, these assets sit at the heart of our neighbourhoods.
But years of austerity measures and cuts to local authority budgets have meant that hard-pressed councils are having to sell, cut or shut crucial parts of our community infrastructure.
There is a better way: Our ‘Places & Spaces – The future of community asset ownership’ paper calls for a £1bn fund to save the nation’s public assets. Not only would this prevent our most iconic community buildings from being lost for good, it’s a huge opportunity to empower communities, reshape public services and regenerate local economies.