Bucks Council ‘running out of assets’ says leader as he eyes further office disposals

Buckinghamshire Council is ‘running out of assets’ to sell, its leader has said as he looked ahead to potentially disposing of more office buildings.

Martin Tett discussed the unitary authority’s shrinking property portfolio in an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service this week.

Asked about new potential asset sales, he said: “We are running out of assets if I am honest. When I joined the old county council, we had an enormous number of assets. Most of that has gone, bits of land, bits of property here and there.

“If it was easy to sell, we have sold it. There will be various assets that come up from time to time, the odd parcel of land or odd property.”

Councils can sell assets to generate ‘capital receipts’, money which must be spent on other capital projects such as buying new assets like land and buildings or refurbishing existing ones.

Money generated from asset sales cannot normally be used to fund ‘revenue costs’, or in other words, the day-to-day running of the council and provision of services.

One of Bucks Council’s recent asset sales saw the King George V House offices in Amersham offloaded to a developer, whose identity has been kept anonymous for commercial reasons.

The offices, which were said to be only 16 per cent full after the pandemic, would give the council a ‘desperately needed’ capital sum, Cllr Tett said in September as his cabinet accepted an offer.

Asked about the sale this week, the leader stressed he was limited in what he could say, but suggested the buildings would be turned into new homes.

He said: “It is almost certain to be residential. We do have a purchaser. As far as I know, it is a done deal.”

Another asset the council is trying to dispose of is its offices on Walton Street in Aylesbury, the headquarters of the former county council.

The brutalist tower block, which has divided critics, has been called ‘Fred’s Fort’ and ‘Pooleys Folly’ after its architect Fred Pooley.

The council has obtained a certificate of immunity from listing for the building in an attempt to facilitate its redevelopment.

This document guarantees the building will not be statutorily listed by the Secretary of State or be served with a building preservation notice by planning officers.

Cllr Tett said: “We are not going to have anybody able to come along and say, ‘oh this is an architectural masterpiece’. It is a pretty hideous building actually, a hideous 1960s monstrosity.”

The council leader said the tower would probably have to be converted rather than knocked down, due to the likely ‘high costs’ of demolition, but said he ‘did not have a plan on the table’.

One issue with developing the tower is that it only contains two lifts and adding new ones is expected to cost millions of pounds.

Cllr Tett said the council needed to ‘work with specialists’ to redevelop the site and revealed he had been talking to an urban regeneration company behind projects in Manchester, including around Piccadilly Station.

He said: “We are having conversations. There is no decision. The reality is it is very tricky. If it was easy, we would have done it.

“I’d like us to have a much more modern, attractive retail offer. In an ideal world, you would level all the sixties stuff and start again but that is not viable financially.”

By contrast, the redevelopment of the council’s former offices in Amersham and those on Queen Victoria Road in Wycombe would be ‘easier’, according to the council leader.

The future of the Wycombe offices is still ‘up for grabs’ as the council pushes ahead with its plan to move offices and the county archives into the floors above the town centre’s Tesco superstore, which temporarily closed for refurbishment last month.

Cllr Tett said: “Do we retain them? Do we sell them? None of that has been finally decided.”

The council is looking at potentially relocating the mayor’s parlour and meetings of the Wycombe Town Committee from the Queen Victoria Road offices to other buildings in the town centre.

Cllr Tett said the future of the offices ‘had not been decided yet’ but described them as a ‘possible site’ for redevelopment.

He added: “When you look at all the pressure on housing, we will look at every opportunity to provide housing in town rather than on green fields and on Green Belt.”