Sticking with food & drink for a couple more posts, from The Times (Londinium), November 26:
A vote has sealed the fate of the market, but legal experts say the plan may be unlawful — as City of London Corporation plans to pay traders millions in compensation
Smithfield, the capital’s oldest meat market, is to close — bringing to an end 900 years of trading on the historic site.
The fate of both Smithfield and Billingsgate fish market, in Canary Wharf, was sealed during a private vote by the governing body of their owner and operator, the City of London Corporation, on Tuesday afternoon.
The Corporation had previously planned to relocate both markets to a new site in Dagenham, in the capital’s eastern suburbs.
However, owing to cost overruns, the court approved a new plan to scrap the £1 billion relocation plan but close the market regardless.
Instead, the Corporation will offer the traders compensation payments, which The Times understands could total more than £300 million, and table a bill in parliament to absolve itself of responsibility for running the market. The markets will operate until “at least” 2028
The governing body said after the vote it was “actively supporting traders to identify suitable new sites” but there is no obligation on the traders to reopen their businesses elsewhere.
A market has operated on or near the Smithfield site since the tenth century. In 1174 it was described by William Fitzstephen, clerk to Thomas Becket, as “a smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be sold, and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks, and cows and oxen of immense bulk”. The corporation was given the right to run it and other wholesale food markets in 1327 by Edward III.
Now the authority wants to turn the Smithfield site into a mixed-use cultural development alongside the London Museum and redevelop the Billingsgate site as housing.
Three King’s Counsel barristers, who sit on the hundred-strong court, have written to the Corporation’s “town clerk”, warning that the vote could be “unlawful” because a study into the importance of the markets to London’s food supply, demanded by the court this year, has not yet been produced.
“Understanding the social and economic importance of the existing markets is vital to any decision by the court to abolish them, as is the social and economic implications of doing so,” the letter reads.
“The failure to have this information available would, we are concerned, be unlawful,” write Gregory Jones KC, Suzanne Ornsby KC and William Upton KC.
On Monday the corporation told The Times that its own lawyers were “satisfied” with the legality of the vote.
Meanwhile, Henry Pollard, chairman of the markets committee, has written to his court colleagues warning that “the process here is wrong”, criticising the lack of a food security report and warning that the additional compensation to the traders — “an unquantified amount [of] over £300 million” — could be a misuse of public funds.
Even with the compensation payment to traders, scrapping the relocation of the markets and giving up the responsibility to run a wholesale market would save the corporation more than £600 million. It would be a similar sum to refresh the markets for a further 20 years of use, according to an internal corporation paper first reported by the local democracy campaign group Reclaim EC1....
....MUCH MORE
Earlier: "Boozing it Up In The French Alps"
