Case Studies: public assets

Publicly owned land and property assets are an increasingly important tool for local authorities to support economic growth and generate revenue funding. Shrinking budgets have created financial pressures for local authorities to reduce expenditure as well as finding new ways of funding public services and day to day spending. Maximising the contribution of assets as sources of long-term revenue funding by leading, shaping and unlocking development has become essential.

This paper brings together a number of case studies on how cities in the UK and beyond have made use of public assets. Publicly owned land and property assets are an increasingly important tool for local authorities to support economic growth and generate revenue funding. Shrinking budgets have created financial pressures for local authorities to reduce expenditure as well as finding new ways of funding public services and day-to-day spending. Maximising the contribution of assets as sources of long-term revenue funding by leading, shaping and unlocking development has become essential. The case studies demonstrating how cities use public assets and what they are trying to achieve are split into seven groups:

• Delivering physical development and regeneration
• Influencing development using public assets
• Unlocking development for particularly difficult individual sites and projects
• Building new suburbs
• Improving performance with data
• Delivering efficient services using data
• • Creating an attractive and functional city centre