PUBLIC land should never be sold off (Council to seal deal for sell-off, SWA, January, 25). 
No one is making it anymore and it is right that the benefits of the rising value of land should go exclusively to the community which created that value. 
If there is any publicly owned land not required by the public sector, then it can be rented out at current market rates but not sold. Selling land always leads to a loss for the community.
There is of course a problem for local councils which might prefer to hold on to their land assets. 
Thanks to savage cuts in their allocations from central government, councils might be forced to sell off land or other assets in order to provide short-term finance for pressing immediate needs. 
But this an example of “eating the seed corn”; it can only be done once and when councils have sold off everything that is saleable there will still be the problem of finding the finance to meet their statutory obligations. What then?
It is hard not to see here an illustration of what the writer Naomi Klein calls “The Shock Doctrine” George Osborne has used the excuse of austerity to do what Tories have always wanted to do, namely, to shrink the public sector in order to provide tax cuts for the very rich and put billions of pounds of the public’s money into the hands of private companies.
 
Clive Shakesheff
Lewis Way
Chepstow