FOI - Land and property sales
Case reference FOI2025/01166
Received 10 November 2025
Published 2 December 2025
Request
Response
1) A list of all land and property sold by the local authority between 1 January 2020 and 31 October 2025.
For each sold asset, please include:
– The address of the land/property
– A description of the asset, including what your local authority used it for
– The sale price
– The buyer (please state the name of any company, organisation, etc. or otherwise state whether it was a private individual)
– The date of sale
Please see attached spreadsheet
2) Please provide a list of all the land and property currently owned by your local authority.
For each asset, please include:
– The address of the land/property This information can be found here Local Government Transparency Code please refer to Local authority land– A description of the asset, including what your local authority uses it for This information can be found here Local Government Transparency Code please refer to Local authority land
– The date of purchase
– The purchase price
Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 the appropriate cost limit to deal with a response is £450. At the statutory calculation of £25 per hour of work this means that a request can be considered excessive were it to take more than 18 hours of work. A request above this limit can be refused under section 12 of the Act.
We consider that the information requested in regard to the date of purchase and purchase price of each asset currently owned by the Council, would exceed the limit set out above. We have been informed by our Property and Estates Team that there are well over 100 operational sites, plus approximately 200 smaller sites. Land ownership records are often spread over multiple systems, such as GIS, Legal and Property Management. In addition, some of our older records are in paper archives or legacy databases that are not easily searchable. Some land may have been acquired in parcels, merged, or split over time. We would possibly need to trace every land title of which there are hundreds. Determining the original purchase date and value for each current plot can involve tracing historical title changes. We would then need to verify the information against Land Registry records and internal finance systems, unfortunately this is almost impossible if we are dealing with unregistered land. It has therefore been estimated that this would exceed the £450 statutory limit.
If you know which piece of land you want to check you can contact Land Registry. Alternatively, if there is a specific asset you want checked we can possibly locate the particulars if we hold them.
Documents
This is Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.