Businesses on Olympic site fight to avoid eviction

The London Mayor Ken Livingstone will embark on one of the UK's largest and most controversial compulsory purchase programmes this month to clear the site for the 2012 Olympic Games.

About 300 businesses based on a 250-acre site within the proposed Olympic Park in Stratford will be sent the orders in the next few weeks, it emerged yesterday.

The companies, which employ at least 5,000 staff in the Marshgate Lane area, will be told to vacate their premises and take up an offer of alternative land before the bulldozers move in at the beginning of July 2007 to clear the site for construction of the main Olympic Stadium.

Lawyers for the businesses claim that their clients, who include the country's largest fish curer and the last vinyl record manufacturer in the UK, are holding out because they have been offered alternative sites up to 50 miles away from their current addresses.

But the London Development Agency (LDA), which handles property deals for the mayor and is responsible for buying up the land for the Olympics, insists that negotiations are ongoing.

"We are still keen to offer voluntary deals for the businesses concerned," an LDA spokesman said yesterday.

One of the advisers on the project, Jones Lang LaSalle, reckons that the Olympic project represents the biggest ever Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) programme in England.

It will even outstrip the disruption caused by the building of the M60 relief road, the Jubilee Line extension, the Docklands Light Railway and the M11.

Acrimony has surrounded the proposed relocation of the Marshgate Lane business ever since London launched its 2012 bid more than two years ago.

The companies wrote to the International Olympic Committee complaining about their treatment and even threatened to take their protest to last month's vote in Singapore.

Relations between the Marshgate Lane group of businesses and the LDA have been further strained after it was claimed that lawyers and other professional advisers acting for the businesses but paid for by the LDA under the requirements of the Compulsory Purchase Act were charging fees in excess on £2m.