By David Smith, St Helier Pub Group

In his letter, Councillor Andrew Judge is referring selectively to parts of the Local Government Ombudsman and Audit Commission reports into the Morden Tavern affair.

The devil is in the detail: careful reading of the reports clearly confirms some of the original concerns raised by campaigners and still leaves troubling questions unanswered.

The Local Government Ombudsmen found that Reef Estates was given "preferred bidder" status before the bidding process was complete.

The Audit Commission found that, "the Council did not facilitate other potential developers' potential interest by putting them in touch with the [estate] agents."

The Commission also noted that records were not kept in meetings with the developer and that there was "rather limited" financial analysis of the financial appraisal.

In addition, the Commissioner recommended that, in future, Merton Council get independent valuations on property for selling it.

There never has been a clear statement of what a ‘viable’ bid would have looked like to keep the public house open, or why, originally, planning officers were informing Coun Judge there had been no bids from the pub sector when clearly there were.

It is, in any case, a matter for any pub operator what a viable offer would have been, and not Coun Judge or Merton Council, who are not in the pub business.

The original ‘None’ has now become ‘viable’.

The St Helier Pub Group (SHPG) is aware of the sequence of events and the content of communications between Merton Council, Reef Estates and others thanks to the Freedom of Information Act which was used to procure copies of relevant documents, including email.

We would also like to point out that there is now a serious commercial interest in the site of the Morden Tavern, by the SHPG itself.

The SHPG has a business plan developed with financial and pub trade professionals and backed by a large number of local residents willing to invest their own funds in to this cooperative project.

We look forward to working with Coun Judge and Merton Council in the best interests of the St Helier residents and Merton residents, once the appeal by the developer has been rejected.

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