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plans by the time it was going to come to fruition it was going to be outdated.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…
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