Oxford City Council II: Can't even sell the silver properly

Just across the park from my flat is a house, known as Dairy Lodge. It is part of the legacy of the Morrell family who built it as part of their parkland estate which the City Council requisitioned many years ago. Part of the estate was fenced off, became Robert Maxwell's house and is now part of Oxford Brookes University. But the city hung onto other parts of the park, including two of its lodges, Dairy Lodge being one of them.

To my mind it is extremely dubious as to whether they have an ethical right to flog these houses off - being a part of private property they simply purloined from the last owners and clarly a part of the park as a coherent whole, but such is their financial predicament and incompetent financial management that they decided they had no choice but to flog off Dairy Lodge.

And so it's been on the market - you will understand that even Oxford is a difficult market at the moment (someone just reduced their £1.2m property in Old Headington to £995k for example) - for six weeks or so. It was only put onto the agent's website three weeks or so ago, with a closing date for "informal tenders" of 26th January.

Now, personally, I would have sold it leasehold - after all it is an integral part of Headington Hill Park and therefore of public interest as part of that estate. But no, it was sold freehold. It includes in its £425,000 guide price a large barn, almost as big as the house itself, which, the particulars suggest, might be developed with appropriate planning consent.

Guess who grants planning consent? Yep, you got it, the city council as planning authority. Planning consent is like writing a blank cheque to the applicant for the amount of money by which the site will appreciate if it has permission to become a five bed, three reception property instead of the three bed two reception (and downstairs bathroom) property as sold.

So you would think that a local planning authority would have a guess at what sort of planning consent any new owner might apply for and do it for themselves, and knock up the sale price by a hundred grand or so. But no, Oxford City Council, with consummate incompetence and possibly even maladministration, has flogged the house as seen whilst encouraging the new occupier to make a small fortune on it instantly by suggesting they apply to convert the barn.

Great - this is a council so strapped for cash that they are selling a unique building in an historic setting that one has to wonder whether they even have the right to sell. And they can't even get that right! I wonder how the District Auditor is going to view that?