Oswestry for Sale: Trust Us, We’re Shropshire Council

Four Secret Recommendations, One Public Asset, and Not a Straight Answer in Sight

On 5 August, Shropshire Council’s Cabinet held a special meeting. The public was removed. The press was removed. The doors were shut. Behind those doors sat a report on the disposal of an important piece of publicly owned land at the Oswestry Sustainable Urban Extension.

When the doors reopened, the people who actually own the land were told only that four recommendations had been approved. Not what they were. Not how much land was involved. Not what valuation had been obtained. Not who wanted it. Not what terms were under discussion. Just the bald assurance that four secret recommendations had glided through private session and out the other side untouched by public scrutiny.

Private-session Oswestry corner site illustration

That is not openness. That is not accountability. That is local government’s favourite conjuring trick: remove the witnesses, whisper the commercial incantation, and hope the taxpayer mistakes silence for competence.

The confidential report, as we understand it, authorises the disposal of either the whole corner site or part of it. It hands the practical power to determine the disposal strategy, legal structure, heads of terms and other commercial matters to the Council’s interim finance chief, Duncan Whitfield, and Interim Service Director for Place Shaping, Kassandra Polyzoides, in consultation with Councillor Roger Evans. The report also records interest from a major national retailer. The identity of that retailer has not been published. Nor has the valuation. Nor the amount of land involved. Nor the marketing process. Nor whether the final deal is required to return to Cabinet before the Council commits itself.

So this is not merely a discussion about whether land might one day be sold. It is, on the face of it, the handing of very broad authority to a very small group of people, under cover of “commercial confidentiality”, while the public is expected to clap politely from outside the room.

The really delicious part is that Shropshire Council seems to imagine it has earned this trust. This is, after all, the same authority that gave us the North West Relief Road, a project that devoured years of time, effort and money before collapsing into an expensive monument to political overconfidence. It is the same authority still lugging around the Riverside debacle, where borrowed money and grand ambition have so far produced more uncertainty than regeneration. It is the same authority that ventured into IP&E in the hope of behaving like a commercial operator and ended up demonstrating that enthusiasm is not a substitute for competence. And of course there is Cornovii, the great municipal housebuilding adventure, which arrived wearing the clothes of ambition and has spent much of its life trying to explain where the results went.

Shropshire Council track record

After all that, one might think Shropshire Council would approach the disposal of strategic public land with near-religious devotion to transparency, independent valuation and demonstrable market testing. Instead, it has reached for the old favourites: secrecy, delegation and the soothing suggestion that all of this is far too commercially sensitive for the public to understand.

The Oswestry corner site is not some neglected triangle of weeds behind a depot. Council planning material has long treated it as a gateway site connected to the wider Sustainable Urban Extension. That makes it strategically important. If a national retailer wants in, the public is entitled to know how that interest has been handled. Was the site openly marketed? Was the whole site valued separately from a part-site option? Were alternative uses tested? Were local businesses given a fair chance? Is there special purchaser value? Has the Council satisfied itself that it will achieve the best consideration reasonably obtainable? Those are not extremist questions. They are the sort of elementary questions that ought to arise whenever a cash-strapped authority starts carving up public assets.

Instead, the public is being treated like a nuisance in the corridor while the adults discuss the silverware.

Chief Executive Tanya Miles has already told staff that the Oswestry decision forms part of the Council’s work to improve value for money and strengthen the organisation. A lovely phrase, “value for money”. It has a clean, nutritious sound to it. Unfortunately, in Shropshire it often appears in the same sort of way one hears about buried treasure or reliable train services: with confidence, but seldom with immediate proof.

Value for money magic trick

The public is therefore being asked to believe that unseen people have considered unseen figures and approved unseen recommendations concerning an unnamed retailer, all for the benefit of taxpayers who are not permitted to inspect the evidence. That is not transparency. It is a séance. Value for money is apparently somewhere in the room; we are just not allowed to turn the lights on.

What makes this worse is the timing. Shropshire Council is not floating in surplus cash. It is surviving on Exceptional Financial Support and telling residents that every pound must count. Services are under pressure, bills keep rising, and lectures about financial discipline now arrive as regularly as council tax demands. Yet when a strategically important public asset is on the table, the discipline suddenly goes behind closed doors and the explanation vanishes into the same drawer as everything else marked “commercial”.

This decision can still be called in. It should be. Not because every private discussion is improper. Not because every national retailer is automatically suspect. And not because one needs a taste for melodrama to see the problem. It should be called in because the scale of the secrecy and the breadth of the delegation demand proper scrutiny before the Council disappears further down the road. If councillors are content to let it pass unchallenged, they should have the decency to explain why.

No allegation of corruption is being made here against Roger Evans, Duncan Whitfield, Kassandra Polyzoides, Steve Law, the unidentified retailer or anyone else. But secrecy, concentrated authority, limited visibility and delayed accountability are exactly the conditions in which corruption, favouritism or serious financial error can flourish. Shropshire Council should know that by now. It has spent years paying for these lessons.

Definition of insanity cycle

And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result, Shropshire Council appears to have adopted it as an asset-disposal strategy.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about closed doors is what eventually leaks out from underneath them.

Since writing this article, information has emerged about the history of the Mile End land which raises rather more serious questions than simply who wants to buy it and for how much.

Shropshire Council has been discussing this land since at least 2017. We now know that Cornovii pursued it for housing despite documented asbestos contamination and the need for substantial remediation. We also know that the Council subsequently concluded that retail development could make the site more viable because, in its own words, the land is “very contaminated”.

So, before anyone congratulates themselves on another clever property transaction, there is one rather obvious question hanging in the air:

What exactly did Shropshire Council know, when did it know it, what has all this cost the taxpayer, and why are the answers apparently hiding behind another locked committee-room door?

We decided to find out.