§ Mr. GreenwayTo ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to her oral statement of 24 June 2002,Official Report, column 599, on the sale of school playing fields, if she will place in the Library the figures available to her Department in respect of sales between 1979 and 1997. [64703]
§ Mr. CabornStatistics on playing field sales were not collected until our playing fields legislation came into force. Public concern about the loss of school playing fields led directly to the introduction in October 1998 of Section 77 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Before Section 77 was introduced, only grant-maintained schools were required to seek consent from the Secretary of State before selling land, including areas of their playing fields. Local authorities and other schools that owned their own playing fields were free to sell without restriction.
The then Department for Education and Employment estimated that an average of 40 playing fields a month were sold in this way before October 1998. Their estimate 123W is based on the number of playing field disposals at grant-maintained schools between April 1996, when the previous Government further encouraged the disposal of playing fields by relaxing the Local Authority Capital Finance Regulations which governed the use of sale proceeds, and 1 October 1998, when section 77 took effect. During this 30-month period, some 64 grant-maintained schools were given approval to dispose of areas of playing field, which is an average of over two a month. Using the proportion of grant-maintained schools at that time compared with the number of other schools, the Department for Education and Skills estimate the total number of playing field disposals each month to have been around 40.