The Corporation of London should be the next owner of New Covent Garden wholesale market, chairman of the Covent Garden Market Authority Leif Mills told the Journal in his last week in office.
The opinion of Mills might seem bizarre given that he has spent the last three years engaged in court battles with the Corporation on his London market’s behalf. But he insists that Defra need look no further when it eventually decides how to dispose of its Nine Elms asset.
“”In spite of our problems, in my opinion the Corporation is the one party with the necessary experience to take the market on and develop it as a going concern, which has been stipulated as a condition by the government,” Mills said.
Defra said this week that it is to tender for a corporate private-sector partner to advise it on the disposal of the market. “We will be appointing a contractor using our “call-off” list of contractors approved by the government to work with us,” said a spokesperson. “It is not therefore a process of open competition and it will take a few months.”
Contractors will be expected to recommend the most effective way for Defra to handle the disposal process. Other than a sale to the Corporation of London, potential options include offering the site to all existing stakeholders, to elicit interest in a tenants’ takeover.
Mills thinks that is unlikely to happen, although he did say that an outside consortium working alongside tenants could be a possibility.
“There are of course various options open to the government,” he said. “This is just the next stage of a long process. The most difficult aspect for them to sort out is what they are actually tendering to a potential buyer. The 56-acre site is an attractive proposition in itself. But, it is difficult to see what is in it for any commercial company that looks into purchasing the site. Once they see the capital commitment needed to improve the infrastructure and the long-term nature of development, I think most companies or consortiums would be likely to turn their backs.”
The crux of the issue is that ex-agriculture minister Nick Brown pledged that the government would only sell the market to a buyer committed to continuing the horticultural wholesale market on the premises. For a commercial developer to purchase the site and transform it into anything else would, at best, require a long-winded legal process.
Mills added: “After the Saphir Report into London’s wholesale markets, the Corporation stated its belief in composite markets and proposed to develop New Spitalfields as the capital’s composite site. The cost of land has spiralled around that area, due to the Olympic bid, and the potential windfall they would receive from the sale of Billingsgate market, would enable them to put their ideas into action at Nine Elms.”
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