The great plan to pull down the Whitgift shopping Centre to build a new shopping centre has failed…

For over a decade Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has been in negotiations with the local Tories and then the local Labour Council administrations to pull down the Whitgift Centre – owned by the titular Whitgift foundation- and build a new shopping centre.   

This grand plan did not involve a phased demolition and re-build but a wholesale demolition and the compulsory purchase of large chunks of surrounding real estate such as the failed Allders department store building in order to make one huge shopping mall.

This was always a terrible plan.  

When CPOs - which are an extreme tool of the state and should be a method of last resort - were invented they were for things like building motorways and widening bypasses. The use of them to buy small shops in order to build bigger shops is wrong and anti-competitive.

The Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield scheme to have the whole of the town centre owned by one property developer (who keeps being subject to corporate takeovers and getting ever longer hyphenated names) who bought large chunks at cheap CPO prices always represented something like one of Stalin’s five year plans.  Like Stalin’s 5 year plans by the time it was going to come to fruition it was going to be outdated.  The plan is so huge and its gestation period so long and protracted that every time it moves forward in development it has to be moved backwards towards a redesign because the “retail landscape has changed”.

In the meantime by allowing one company to have such power over such a large area the Council has displaced a huge number of small businesses. 

The reason the Whitgift Centre is so empty is because the Council constantly threaten to knock it down. Thus many large retailers such as Sports Direct long ago decamped to the Purley Way. Its the George’s Walk farce all over again when all the units there were emptied for a development that wasn’t going to happen for a decade. As soon as that was aborted they filled up again.  Of course by forcing its tenants towards failure the Whitgift Foundation and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield increase the political urgency on the Council to break through the political and logistical impass and give them what they want – an excuse to turn the whole site into a huge high rise housing estate – and yet the Council can never give in to their spiralling demands so it has all gone pear shaped because though a small fortune has been spent on architects plans and simulations …in the meantime Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield have simply run out of money and got Brexit/Internetiseverything jitters.

By CPOing such a large area of the town centre and gluing it onto the Whitgift Centre the Council has also become totally beholden to Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield putting its self in a terrible negotiating position …whereby having no fallback plan leaves them at the mercy of the developers whims and caprices to ramp up the number of housing vs retail units.  Every time the project passes the planning permission hurdle it seems to need more planning permissions because it has been redesigned again.

The problem with the Whitgift Centre wasn’t that it didn’t not make a profit.  It is that it doesn’t make a large enough profit for the Whitgift Foundation. They have decided that retail does not make them as much money as housing would.  Of course it might have made more money if a previous Labour administration hadn’t privatised the car parks leading to ever spiralling car parking charges as NCP get richer and richer and the shop owners poorer and poorer…

The whole weneedtobulldozeashoppingcentretobuildashoppingcentre explanation originally offered for the plan was clearly a layer or sugar on the bitter pill that the Whitgift Foundation regards its Centre as a failure that should be housing. Nevertheless politicians of both sides swallowed this pill whole and we are now suffering the side effects.

Crucial questions remain unanswered. Such as why does the Whitgift Foundation’s desire to rebuild the Whitgift Centre require the forced purchase of other sites? 

While, for example, Croydon Village Outlet resembled a department store that was being run by Trotters Independent Trading the fact that anyone tried at all flies in the face of what Tory MP (now Lord) Gavin Barwell said to me a decade ago that no other retailer would move into this old site because it was too old hat. The truth is that these people represent the real entrepreneurship in retail the government should be encouraging but for some reason it seems to despise small businesses… Being obsessed instead with Business Investment Districts and other Blairite schemes to increase business rates.

Still it could be worse. They could have demolished the whole centre to a pile of rubble and CPOed lots of land as well only to run out of money. At least they ran out of money before starting. Perhaps it would be prudent if Councils want to undertake such schemes in the future to at least insist on cash upfront in return for the CPOs so that companies like Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield wouldnt waste everyone’s time. Then again if they’d had to make concrete commitments maybe the plans they drew up wouldn’t have been so grandiose.

This scheme is the very worst of public private partnerships…