This might not be desperately interesting to those living outside Thanet but council sell-offs could affect wherever you are too. Especially if you’re ever unlucky enough to have a Kipper council. Not that I can really complain. They haven’t done anything* yet…. 
*unless you count breaking their promise to re-open Manston Airport (grrr)
from Isle of Thanet Gazette 7th October 2016
*
I have no idea who wrote the report presented to the meeting of Thanet District Council last Tuesday but I would hazard a guess that he or she hasn’t read much George Orwell.
The great novelist’s advice to never use a long word when a short one will do, clearly cuts little ice with the author of a document that offers: “There is a financial imperative to accelerate disposals” (we need to start flogging stuff a bit quicker than we thought) and whose idea of explaining the “Medium Term Financial Strategy” (how we’re going to get out of this financial mess) involves talk of “rationalising the asset base” (selling what you can).
But however you put it, I can quite see that there could well be “a significant gap between receipts and capital programme commitments” and a need for “ongoing cost savings in the maintenance of assets.”
In other words, there are quite a few crumbling old buildings dotted around Thanet that cost a fortune to keep going, and the council doesn’t have enough dosh to do it. Hence the suggestion that the Ice House in Ramsgate, the Westgate Pavilion, various tracts of agricultural land and some choice green spaces should go under the hammer to cut annual costs and help fill the coffers.
I can see the theory behind offloading – if there’s not enough money then sometimes something does have to give – and I can also see this: whenever and whichever council-owned asset is put up for sale, someone is going to kick off.
Already MP Craig Mackinlay is talking about a fire sale, pushing petitions and citing Dreamland debts, while Kipper King Chris Wells predictably lays the blame for it all at the doors of Labour and the Tories.
Meanwhile, I find myself in rare agreement with one-time councillor and known party-hopper Ian Driver, who speaks of “UKIP’s environmental vandalism” and urges preservation of the farmland that serves to separate the Thanet towns. We, the public, are invited to make such comments – through our ward councillors apparently – before 19th October.
At the time of writing, nearly 2000 people have also signed a petition you can find on change.org calling for a full public consultation before anything is disposed of.
Personally, I didn’t even know where the Ice House was till I googled it, but I would suggest to TDC that if you must liquidise, then make it buildings, not precious land and draw up a set of guidelines for any eventual sale.
May I propose:
- Properties are sold on the open market at the market rate (not to someone’s mate for a song, who then goes on to do the place up and make a killing.)
- Where development is possible, they are sold with planning permission already in place to ensure the full value is reflected. (See above.)
- First to go are the buildings that cost the most and bring in the least (not rocket science but when it comes to council manoeuvres I take nothing for granted).
- It is ensured that where there is profit to be made – the council makes some of it, not just a canny builder. Could there be partnership deals? Agreements on lucrative restoration projects where a slice of the spoils come back to the local tax-payer?
- And finally: a ban on decisions that are plain daft. Of course you can’t hand over land like Philpott Field off Callis Court Road, or Cliff Field – the green space above Joss Bay. Are you Kippers crazy? But of course my beef here is heightened because I live nearby. And if a public consultation is held, then everyone taking part will have their own agenda, their own brand of NIMBY outrage and a necessarily subjective input. There is however, one question that concerns us all, and should be the very first one we ask.
When these assets are gone, and the council next runs out of money, what will be left to sell then?
Jane Wenham-Jones 
Well said JWJ. Hopefully the petition will prevent this being “put through on the nod”, allowing potential investors to line their own pockets at the environmental expense of Thanet residents.