A MAJOR sell-off of Bradford Council land and property, from substantial care homes to tiny grass verges, has brought in £24 million over the past five years.

Since April 2010, Bradford Council has sold off about one in eight of its land and property assets, figures obtained by the Telegraph and Argus show.

The authority, which owns thousands of sites across the district, has sold 770 of them in the past five years, raising £24.1 million.

Council bosses say that selling off these surplus buildings and plots frees them up to be developed into other things, from multi-million pound factories to medical centres, while at the same time raising cash for other council building projects.

But the opposition Conservatives have called for the proceeds from these sales to be kept within the same neighbourhoods, arguing that communities which have lost facilities like public toilets deserve to benefit from their sale.

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Many of the sites are sold at auction. Last month, nine Council properties went under the hammer, raising more than £800,000.

This included the former Harbourne House care home in Wibsey, which was controversially closed in January, and sold for £312,000.

A former children's respite centre, Brunswick House in Greengates, sold for £150,000 and vacant Scholemoor Cemetery offices in Lidget Green, went for £73,000.

Other lots included semi-detached homes, lock-up garages and vacant plots of land.

The Council still owns about 3,000 sites across the district, and its sales are continuing.

Sites now up for grabs include prominent former Council office Flockton House, in Bowling, Bradford, which has been levelled and has planning permission for housing, and former residential home Thackley Grange, in Idle, Bradford.

Councillor Andrew Thornton, who leads on asset management at Labour-controlled Bradford Council, said there was no particular 'drive' to sell off its assets, but that the Council had various parcels of land which it did not need and could be put to good use by someone else.

Cllr Thornton said: "We have a number of assets, a number of pieces of land and property, not all of which we require and some of which is required by other people to do useful things with."

He said examples of this included land at Greyhound Drive, Bradford, which had been sold to Asian food firm Mumtaz to create a multi-million pound factory, land at Northampton Street, Bradford, which had been sold for the development of a medical centre, and land at North Dean Avenue in Keighley, where the council sold a small area of access land to enable a private developer to build 190 homes.

And he said that the money they raised by selling off this property was used to fund new building projects.

He said: "We build new things with it. We use money from capital receipts to put into the capital programme to build new things - to build an extra care home, to build new public realm stuff in Saltaire, and things of that nature."

But Councillor Glen Miller, leader of the Conservative group at Bradford Council, said he had concerns about the way the system operated.

He said: "I have no problem with them selling surplus assets, but it's how they decide what's surplus.

"To me, it's not a good idea to sell an office block, to get that capital receipt, only to go and rent office space elsewhere."

Cllr Miller, who represents the Worth Valley, said that the Council should also consider selling other assets, not only land and property.

He said: "When the Council is selling off its assets, it can't be cherry-picking. We have got lots of art stored away in a cellar, nobody actually sees them, but they don't want to sell that.

"But they sell off tracts of land here and there that could have future potential."

And Cllr Miller also called for the proceeds from land sales to be used to benefit the immediate surrounding community.

He gave the example of rural communities such as Haworth, where public toilets are being closed at Penistone Hill Country Park.

He said: "Instead of the money being spent within five miles of City Hall, the people of that area, who have lost toilet blocks that they used to use, can get the benefit from it."

Cllr Thornton said such a policy would be "too restrictive".

And he said the Council's current policy was to move out of rented office space and concentrate staff in Council-owned offices, so it was already doing what Cllr Miller had suggested.

Liberal Democrat leader, Councillor Jeanette Sunderland, said she backed the Council's approach of selling off unwanted assets.

But she said she had grave concerns that in one instance from her Idle and Thackley ward - the sale of much-loved family gardens at Railway Road, Idle - things had gone too far.

She said: "The Council has lots of assets it doesn't need and it costs it money to maintain it.

"The Council has assets that just get left, they're not in very good repair and it costs us a lot of money to maintain them.

"It's right and it's proper that it reduces the revenue it spends on assets to re-focus the money on frontline services. I would support that approach.

"However, when they use bullying tactics with people who cannot afford to pay for their own garden, the garden they've rented over the years, then it's turning into something which is mean.

"The current sale of people's gardens is just mean."

Cllr Sunderland said as far as she knew, this was the first time the Council had tried to sell gardens "out from under people who are gardening".

But Cllr Thornton said they had tried to sell the gardens directly to the tenants, as Cllr Sunderland had asked them to originally.

Asked why they had decided to sell off the gardens in the first place, he said: "This just goes back to what the council does, and what we should be putting our efforts and resources into, which is about providing really good services for the people of the district in very, very difficult times."