Councils in Dorset 'collected assets with little thought or strategy'

As a result today’s successor Dorset Council owns around 70 Weymouth hotels, industrial estates across the county and farms, some of which it has no obvious need for, in the view of a senior officer.

Executive director for Place Jan Britton told councillors that before Dorset Council was created in 2019 previous councils in the county, at district and borough level as well as Dorset County Council, had “a tendency to collect assets without purpose, or without strategy behind it, and we are now dealing with some of the legacy of those previous decisions."

His comments came during a discussion on a new asset strategy for Dorset  Council.

He said there was a huge amount of work to be done to unravel what the council owns and what might be the best use for some of them – whether that be re-purposing sites, selling them or passing on to lower tier councils.

“Some will need to be dealt with ahead of others. Our ability to progress them all at the same time will be a bit limited,” he said.

He said that at the moment the strategic plan for assets would bring together certain classes of asset, ie hotels or business parks, and then produce proposals for each type.

Weymouth councillor David Northam said it was staggering that Dorset Council owned assets at 13,059 sites, valued at £441million, but costing the council £13.5million each year to support , yet only generated £4.1m of income.

Another Weymouth councillor, Ryan Hope, said from what he had seen some commercial assets were not of value to the council at all – and were actually a liability.

Councillors had been told in the past that many of its lease agreements, in the past, had been rolled over from one year to the next, without any form of review.

Cllr Northam said there needs to be prioritise sites which were economically viable, and their future.

“I would like to see some of the big ticket items coming forward … you don’t need to get to the end of the list to know what is important,” he said.

Mr Britton said the council needed to be clear about why it held assets, some it would want to for economic, operational or community reasons: “At the moment we are not always clear why we hold an asset and what we hold it for -  and this asset strategy is about bringing more order to that,” he said.

Finance portfolio holder Cllr Simon Clifford said that for more than a decade asset management at the council, and its predecessors, had been poor.

“There has been a lack of rigour, there has been a lack of insight, there has been a lack of understanding of cost-benefit… and sometime there has been bizarre decisions.

“We have got a really good team in place now and the future is now looking bright… it can only be to the benefit of the council,” he said.

Weymouth councillor and Green group leader Cllr Clare Sutton said it was striking how little progress had been made on disposal of council assets since it was created in 2019.

“We know we need to be realising these assets… the big question is will a new strategy expedite the progress?” she said.

Cllr Hope said he  realised the work on the strategy was complicated but he would expect to see results within three months.