The drive for departmental asset sales has accelerated following yesterday’s Budget, which announced plans to raise £2bn from asset sales to fund the Green Investment Bank.

Chancellor George Osborne said in his speech to the House of Commons: “We’ve already committed a billion pounds to [the bank]. Today I commit two billion pounds more, funded from asset sales and underwritten by the Treasury. This will enable the Green Investment Bank to start operation one year earlier than planned – in 2012.” The hastened timetable and the funds’ underwriting is likely to lead to increased Treasury pressure on departments to sell assets quickly.

The £775m proceeds from the sale of High Speed 1 have already been set aside to fund the bank, which will provide investment for green infrastructure.

The Budget also set out plans to sell the government’s stake in national air traffic controller NATs, private equity firm Actis and bookmakers the Tote; surplus government property “where the market conditions are right”; and mobile broadband spectrums. A decision on whether to sell the student loan book will be made in the summer.

The government backtracked on plans to set up a Public Data Corporation to sell licenses for data held by the public sector. In January, business minister Ed Davey and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude jointly announced plans to establish the organisation. However, the Budget said that “the government is considering the merits of machinery of government changes to facilitate the development of a Public Data Corporation through a sponsoring department.”

It added that “if the government decides to proceed,” the Cabinet Office will have licensing terms in place by autumn 2011.

On regulation, the Budget set out plans to allow the public to challenge existing regulations through a website which will ‘crowd-source’ opinions. A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that this site will be launched in April and will thematically list all 22,000 regulations on the statute book, ordered by industries affected. Businesses will have a short, two-week window in which to give feedback, and then “departments will have to remove regulations unless they can justify them,” she said.

The chancellor halted the Equality Act’s dual discrimination rules, which were to be introduced on 6 April. These would have allowed people to claim they had been discriminated against for a combination of reasons, such as gender or disability.

Other regulatory changes include a moratorium on all new regulations affecting “genuine start-ups” and businesses employing fewer than 10 people, and the implementation of Lord Young’s recommendations on health and safety laws.

Pay and pensions update:

The chancellor said that public sector employee pension contributions should be increased by an average of three percentage points. He added that the government accepts all of Lord Hutton’s recommendations as a basis for consultation. “There should be no-cherry picking on either side,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Budget announced a £250 pay increase this year for all civil servants earning £21,000 a year or less.

Written by Joshua Chambers