A rumour has been started that Brent Council sold land to a developer for £3 million and has now bought it back for £92 million. It is a classic case of data being cherrypicked to mislead people.
The land was sold for £3 million, I believe with the empty tower blocks still on it. The retention of the freehold by Brent suggest that buying it back was always envisaged.
Anyone familiar with the tower blocks of the old South Kilburn estate will know how awful those were. Demolishing them could not have been a simple matter of blowing them up, since their sheer size would have risked damaging the surrounding buildings and the building dust would have been hazardous to everyone nearby. Therefore the only way to clear the land for replacement building was through a relatively slow and costly dismantling. This should be seen as an extra cost to the £3 million price.
There is then the cost of building the new housing blocks on the same site which further diminishes the effective gap between the cost that the land was sold at and the "buy back" price. There was also the risk of delays, which gives an additional cost.
Further details are published on the Brent Council web site.
What is being made to sound like an outrageous rip off for the taxpayer actually makes better sense once you think about it.
The real rip offs occurring in Brent's public housing are the continuing right to buy which Eric Pickles keenly promoted and the introduction of permitted development in office space for it to be turned into slum housing. The first results in Councils being forced to sell off property at a discount. The property then being sold to commercial developers and then Council paid for tenants being placed there at great expense or actual repurchase of the buildings at market prices. The second leads to poor quality housing that will lead to a series of social problems of which overcrowding is just one.
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