Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will make an estimate of the cost to the public purse of maintaining under-utilised (a) buildings, (b) other property and (c) land held by Government departments in the last 12 months.

The requested information is not centrally held by the Cabinet Office and complying with this request would incur a disproportionate cost to the Department. Estates operations, performance and finances are for the operating department to manage themselves.

The Government Property Strategy, published August 2022, commits to a smaller, better, greener estate, disposing of surplus, under-utilised and poor quality property to enable efficiency savings and bring in capital receipts. The full report can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-property-strategy-2022-2030

Managing Public Money sets out protocols for the disposal and transfer of surplus property and land assets at Annex A4.15, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/managing-public-money.

Departments can upload data on properties or land that are no longer required for operational purposes on the Government Property Finder (https://www.gov.uk/find-government-property) and / or Register of Surplus Land (https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/28c593bf-85fa-4676-a47b-45189d396ed9/land-register-of-surplus-land).