Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors in Swindon have combined to ‘call in’ a decision taken by the authority’s Conservative deputy leader to sell of land for housing.

Councillor Russell Holland took the decision recently to offer five sites in Swindon, via the council’s housing company, for housing.

He hopes to make £1.4 million ‘profit’ for the council from the sale which could raise a total of £1.9m.

But Labour group leader Coun Jim Grant and his Lib Dem counterpart Stan Pajak have ‘called in’ the decision - that means it will go before the Scrutiny Committee and could be overturned.

The opposition councillors don’t like the fact that the housing company itself won’t build houses on the sites in Marigold Close, Haydon Wick and Nuffield Close, Rannoch Close, Ramleaze Drive and Sparcells Drive, all in Shaw.

The original decision report said that was possible but “there would be a greater risk in generating a dividend through this route due to the construction process and would result in a delay in returning the dividend.”

Councillor Grant said: “This is a straight forward fire-sale of council land to plug the black hole in the council’s budget, plain and simple. Some of these sites even look to be open space.

"When the Conservatives first proposed building houses on sites like these, they said they would be built by the council and the profits from building these homes would help fund local services like road resurfacing. This got cross-party support.

"We have never supported a fire sale of public land to private developers where the council gets none of the control over the development and no profit.

"At the moment the Conservatives have proposed a fire sale of a limited number of sites. But they could easily decide to sell off more public land. That is why, together with the Liberal Democrat Leader, I have called in this decision to the Council’s Scrutiny Committee. The Scrutiny Committee can if they wish stop this fire sale and request that the Council continue building homes themselves where the taxpayer gets the profit.”

But the council says the housing company was set up to make money for the council by both building houses and selling land.

A spokesman said: “The Council’s housing company was set up to use commercial house building as a way of generating profits to support existing Council services.

“This will involve building homes for sale, such as those on Euclid Street, or in other cases looking to sell land with the benefit of planning permission to another developer. Both routes will generate additional revenue into the Council as well as seeking to accelerate housing building within the Borough.”

The next Scrutiny Committee meeting is Monday October 22.