One Public Estate

I wrote an article a few months ago setting out the case for a rural sovereign wealth fund as a post Brexit means of putting rockets under this programme in rural areas.

Here is some more information on that score. The article tells us:

£54m package to enable councils to release unused or surplus land for housing has today been launched by the DCLG in partnership with the One Public Estate (OPE).

The government will provide £45m of the cash through its new Land Release Fund, and will work with the OPE – a partnership between the LGA and the Cabinet Office – to invest the remaining £9m of the money through the scheme’s sixth funding round.

It’s hoped that the cash will drive forward councils to release enough land to build at least 160,000 properties by 2020.

Local authorities have been invited to bid for the funding to support land remediation and small-scale infrastructure – bringing sites forward for housing that otherwise would have not been available for new homes.

Via the OPE, councils are also being asked to think about projects centred around co-location, property consolidation and smarter working in order to make government estate more efficient. Speaking to PSE shortly before the fresh round of the programme was launched, its programme director at the LGA, Brian Reynolds, said he hopes at least another hundred co-locations between local and central government are rolled out by 2020.