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Hundreds of homes built for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham are being sold off by the council at a projected loss of more than £300m, in a situation branded “nothing short of a scandal”.
The government is facing pressure to intervene to stop the sale of 755 properties on the Perry Barr Estate to a private bidder, as the city battles an acute housing and funding crisis.
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The local authority, the largest in Europe, declared itself effectively bankrupt last year, largely due to a financial black hole caused by an equal-pay bill and a botched implementation of an IT system.
At the same time, there are more than 23,000 households on the waiting list for council accommodation and an average of 447 applications received each week.
The current Perry Barr Estate was designed to accommodate athletes during the Commonwealth Games of 2022 and was heralded as a legacy regeneration project of the competition.
The development was stalled because of the coronavirus pandemic, with the athletes housed in student accommodation instead.
The programme was refocused to deliver homes ready for occupation, but the 968 apartments have been sitting empty since they were eventually completed in 2023.
A report presented to the council last week said “challenging and volatile” market conditions impeded their ability to sell the homes to the public, naming the impact of the Liz Truss mini-budget in particular.
It said that selling off the homes to a private buyer would be a “significant loss to the public purse”, but this was the best outcome.
Selling the apartments off individually could take more than five years, the report noted, during which time the council would have to maintain the buildings “at significant expense” during unstable market conditions.
‘Nothing short of a scandal’
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