Council paid £47k for bus shelters - and sold them a year later for £3,600

Labour-run Plymouth City Council has confirmed it has sold three shipping containers that were used as temporary bus shelters on Royal Parade for a short period last year for a total of just £3,625, after it paid 13 times as much for them (£46,802) a little over a year ago.

The income from the sale was £43,177 less than what the council paid for them last year, a loss of 92% on the original purchase price.

Responding, Lib Dem candidate for Peverell Stuart Bonar, who obtained the figures using the Freedom of Information Act, said: “This is an absolute shocker! Is it any wonder the city council’s debt is heading towards £1 billion by the end of this decade when these are the kind of decisions being made?"

The cost to the council will be more after they confirmed that storage costs, which haven’t been disclosed, helped drive the decision to sell the shipping containers.

In what was a shambolic start to 2025 for local people who rely on the buses, the shipping containers were installed in March of that year after the old shelters had been removed two months earlier without new ones ready to replace them. An eight-week cleaning and maintenance contract took the original cost to taxpayers to over £50,000.

Stuart added: “The Labour-controlled council sold off a chunk of Central Park last October when they auctioned off Pounds House and its gardens. That sold for £500,000. Did we really sell off more than an acre of Central Park to help pay for losses like the one they chalked up on shipping containers that were only ever a short-term, stopgap fix? Maybe if they handled public money a little more carefully we wouldn’t have needed to sell off public assets like Pounds House."

Plymouth Liberal Democrats are standing candidates across the city in the council elections on 7 May. The party says decisions like this one are exactly why Plymouth needs councillors who will ask the hard questions.