Unlawful marketing of community assets for sale

Background 

On 14 February 2025, Surrey Heath Borough Council published a Facebook post stating the following:

“Surrey Heath Borough Council is currently offering exciting opportunities for businesses, investors and developers to purchase land or lease office space in prime locations… and we are marketing the following sites: the Woodend Road Car Park in Deepcut, land at Holly Hedge Road, Frimley, and land to the rear of 361–365 London Road, Camberley…”

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Wow. The prospect of leasing an office at the Council’s premises seemed exciting — especially for a business owner like me. The location would have been ideal and could have helped my business grow. However, as I looked into the matter further, I began to question how this decision had been made — particularly given that it occurred a year before the Unitary Council elections, during the final year of Surrey Heath Borough Council’s existence. Surely, such decisions should have been made once the new Unitary authorities were in place.

An interesting development followed when the Chair of the relevant Working Group posted on Facebook, stating:

“I have heard a lot over the weekend about our decision to market some surplus land for sale…”

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She was referring to a meeting held on 31 January 2025 by the Property & Economic Development Working Group. In her post, she defended the decision to market the assets for sale and claimed it was not made behind closed doors. One might have assumed this meant the minutes of that meeting would be made public. She even shared a screenshot of the top portion of the minutes, showing the list of attendees. Later, I learned that even this action may have breached the Council’s constitution, as minutes of Working Groups are confidential unless formally authorised for release by the Council. I don’t know whether anyone has lodged a formal complaint — that’s not my primary concern.

What truly concerned me was that Surrey Heath residents were being taken for granted. While the decision appears to have been made in private, and the minutes have not been published or shared with the public, residents were led to believe that this was not the case.

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I requested the minutes of the meeting from the Council, but they refused to provide them. Later, a Liberal Democrat councillor representing Deepcut defended the decision to market the land on Facebook. The Chair of the Working Group also defended the decision verbally at a Council meeting.

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Meanwhile, our Liberal Democrat MP and the Leader of the Council played down the situation, claiming that no decision to sell the land had been made — as if everything was fine and merry.

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I subsequently read the Surrey Heath Borough Council Constitution and noted that Working Groups do not have any authority to dispose of land or even to decide whether land can be sold or marketed. They are only permitted to make proposals. It was, therefore, entirely inappropriate that a decision to market these community assets was ever presented as final.

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To this day, the Council maintains that marketing is not a ‘disposal’ it’s an exercise to gather information to assist the Executive in its deliberations. If marketing was just a research exercise then the Council should remarket the land once a decision is made to sell the land by the Executive and accept that its Facebook post of 14 February 2025 was misleading. If it does not remarket the land if a decision for sale is made by the Executive, then marketing was the first step of the disposal of the land and the Council's comment is not true. 

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When I enquired further, I was informed that three Council officers, including the Monitoring Officer, attended the 31 January meeting. I was told the Working Group could only have made a proposal. However, no clear explanation has ever been given about who took the actual step of putting the assets on the market.

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The assets were marketed for purchase and offers were received. The Council ignored my concerns, and I felt the only way to confirm my interpretation of events was to instruct a barrister. A King’s Counsel kindly agreed to provide a written legal opinion at a significantly reduced fee — and confirmed that my understanding was indeed correct. I would like to thank all the generous residents and businesses who donated financially towards the counsel’s fees. You can read the barrister's opinion on this, which is interesting. When an unlawful action is taken by the Council, the monitoring officer has to provide a report and the Council should not take any further action until the report is submitted to the Executive by the monitoring officer. 

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I sent a further letter to the Council’s Monitoring Officer and the Leader of the Council, urging them to take the appropriate action. Time was ticking and we had limited time to file a judicial review. Unfortunatley, by the time the monitoring officer came back, I wrote to the Council and they came back again and we wanted to raise funds, we were towards the end of the 3 months' time limit and felt that it was not fair on the residents to not only pay the barrister's fees to review an application (which I had prepared with a skeleton argument) but to also pay the fees of the lawyers which the Council had to instruct to defend the Council's unreasonable position. As such, I wrote to the Monitoring officer again and urged her to change her position but she did not. 

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The steps I took since were as follows: 

1- I lodged a complaint with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

2- Lodged a petition which is now deemed valid and has more than 400 signatures - we need to collect more though 

3- met with residents and councillors 

​4- I will be holding regular online meetings with our residents to explain the situation verbally, hear their views and concerns and to ensure everyone who is impacted has an opportunity to get involved with the campaign. 

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Below is a list of documents for the public to read: 

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MY INSTRUCTIONS TO THE BARRISTER

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MONITORING OFFICER'S RESPONSE 

Contact