“What! The idea is appalling, it stinks. The Crown Estate must act in a way that keeps it beyond reproach. Getting into bed with Lendlease on the blighted Euston over-station development risks reputational suicide.”
The opinion from one impeccable source on learning rumours last week that the Aussie property company was to sign a £24bn joint venture with the steward of what the Red Tops mischievously insist is Royal family real estate.
On Monday came the announcement from Lendlease saying it was its idea to offer land enough for 26,000 homes and 10m sq ft of commercial space. No doubt. But why the board’s chief executive, Dan Labbad, and his boss, first commissioner Sir Robin Budenberg, thought it worthy of passing the offer up to politicians and perhaps the King, is quite another. Decades of controversy are a stone-cold certainty.
Last July energy secretary Ed Miliband announced the formation of GB Energy, along with the news that the Crown Estate was to be a 50% stakeholder, vested with task of putting up £8.3bn of wind turbines by 2029. The GBE deal is “in the national interest” argued Labbad, the 53-year-old Australian chief executive of the 900-strong estate. Fair enough. Bit of a stretch, but good for the country and all that.
But to get into bed with Labbad’s former employer to bail out the £6bn development at Euston? To add Lendlease’s tumbleweed sites at Silvertown, Thamesmead and Stratford in London and 42 acres at Smithfield in Birmingham? Was there no one in government with the wit and power to shout “Stop”? “Do we want to risk the future of the 265-year-old body and the 900 staff any further?” Clearly not. Why not?
On 11 March, the law allowing the Crown Estate to borrow against soaring windblown profits was passed. Last Friday, Miliband’s Great British Energy Bill received Royal Assent.
Peter Bill is a former editor of Estates Gazette
