It’s worth looking objectively at what Councillor Gary Mulvaney proposed at yesterday’s, 12th February, Special Meeting of Argyll & Bute Council on the Castle Toward sale.
It is no more than straightforward logic; and, having been passed by the chamber, it contains as much hope as despair for South Cowal
He said:
- The DV’s valuation of £1.75M is the seller’s valuation.
- Savills valuation of £850k is the buyer’s valuation.
- When does a seller accept a buyer’s valuation?
- Put it on the market.
In the end, any valuation is no more than an educated guess. What matters is what the market will pay – and that cannot be known until a property is for sale and the market responds in whatever way it does.
The Scottish Land Fund has not been set up to screw cheap deals out of landowners for would-be community buyers. It exists to enable communities to become landowners.
It is arguable that some of the deals done in community buy outs have favoured the landowner, who would have been unlikely to have got as good an overall deal on the open market. There is too often a flexibility in the use of public money that would not be the case in purely private sector negotiations.
There is no reason why the Scottish Government may not enable the Land Fund to back a community to bid up to a specified funded level [which the community could augment itself as and if it wished] on the open market, for an agreed property, under an agreed development plan.
As with any auction, the community concerned could express an interest and keep their powder dry on the most effective moment to make its specific bid – if that moment came along. And if it didn’t, they couldn’t have bought it anyway.
What must not happen now in Argyll and Bute Council’s handling of Castle Toward is a retreat to backstairs deals between the council and yet other unnamed potential buyers of the property – which may take a long time to negotiate and may in the end fall through, as was the case with Seasons Holidays.
With the Council continuing to pay what, by its own figures, amounts to £22.7k per month to insure and secure Castle Toward [with many claiming to have seen no trace of security there], the cost of indulging in prolonged private negotiations will be unacceptable.
The Mulvaney motion appears usefully to rule out this approach to its sale, in calling for the property simply to be put on the open market.
The market response – in pace, volume of interest and bidding levels – will dictate which valuation of the unimproved property was nearer the money.
If other interests were to fail to mature into a superior bid acceptable to the council, SCCDC might be able to acquire the property for less than they have currently bid, since the market would have been seen to be uninterested in paying any more than that for it.
The council could stack the odds by sexing up the property. It might apply to itself for planning permission for an outline development plan – as it has done over the glorified bus shelter it wants to erect on Oban’s North Pier – and, as in that instance, grant itself the requested consent.
This wheeze would have two major downsides, both involving additional expense to come off the value of whatever sale might be achieved at the end of the process:
- producing an outline plan for consent would cost money and time – and, unquestionably in the council’s established modus operandi, consultant’s fees;
- any developer interested in the property with outline planning permission would be certain to want to see the council commit to some serious infrastructural improvements to support any commercially viable development down there in South Cowal. This would be an even greater unplanned expenditure to take out of public funds for Argyll & Bute.
The last issue above would give rise to the big question as to whether, in these times of tight public finances and with Argyll’s broad-spectrum territorial neediness, South Cowal would be the most effective target area for major infrastructural development?
With Dunoon the should-be economic engine for Cowal and in the state it’s in, that question would not take long to answer; and that answer would be found without taking into consideration competing needs elsewhere in Argyll.
In our view South Cowal would now be advised to look at the fortunate aspects of this outcome of the best shot they gave the attempt to buy the Castle Toward property in the interests of community sustainability.
There is liberation alongside disappointment and possibly in equal measure. There will be other projects of a more manageable scale than inheriting so badly neglected a property as this has been allowed to become. They will not now have to wrestle with issues we would expect to exist around the title of the property.
When the council was dancing its last lobster quadrille on Castle Toward, with Actual Reality the wallflower in that set, For Argyll spent most of a day at Kilmory, going through the title deeds. We are probably one of the very few to have done this. With that exercise back sometime in 2010, the detail recedes but the memory remains of questions we became aware of around some access and water rights. This would not have been a straightforward acquisition.
If, however, SCCDC is encouraged to gird the loins and get back into action – and if it can assure itself that is is now in its own interests to do so – the best place to start would be via local MSP Michael Russell and the Scottish Government – to explore the ability of the Land Fund to support them in a potential bid on the open market.
The key outcome of the Mulvaney motion that found favour in the chamber yesterday is that Castle Toward is, under this clear instruction from the chamber, to be put on the open market without delay.
And the bottom line is that fiscal prudence dictates that the council needs to get shot, as best it can, of an inherited asset it has allowed to become nothing more than a running drain on its finances.
