Peel has escalated its £583m bid for Harworth Group, holding the offer at 172.5p a share and going directly after the company’s performance. As Place North East reported, Peel now describes the offer as a 36.9% premium to the one-month weighted average share price, and Harworth’s board has again unanimously rejected it.
The numbers Peel is using
This is a considerably harder attack than the opening bid, and the figures are specific.
Peel says Harworth’s administrative expenses and net finance costs combined reached £47m in FY2025, against £14.7m of passing rental income. It says those combined costs have risen 103.2% over four years. And it puts Harworth’s annualised total accounting return at 3.9% over the past four years.
Set that last figure against the 8.1% five-year return Harworth cited when it first rejected the bid, and you can see the argument being had. Both numbers can be accurate over different periods. Choosing which period to quote is the whole game in a contested takeover.
The target that slipped
Peel’s sharpest point concerns delivery. Harworth originally aimed to grow EPRA net development value to £1bn by the end of 2027, and has since pushed that to somewhere between end-2028 and 2029. Peel argues hitting the revised target needs around 8% annual growth, which it says is “significantly ahead of Harworth’s historic performance”.
That is a fair question to ask of any management team. A target moved back by one to two years invites exactly this scrutiny.
The data centre disagreement
Harworth’s defence leans substantially on its power-enabled land and the prospect of hyperscale data centre sales, following Microsoft’s £106.6m purchase of Skelton Grange in 2024, with a second sale said to be in advanced negotiations.
Peel calls that opportunity “highly speculative” and early stage, and cautions against assuming it converts into quick, material returns.
Someone is going to be wrong here, and it matters beyond this deal. If powered land in the North really is the asset class Harworth says it is, that reprices a lot of Northern brownfield. If Peel is right that it is speculative, several strategies across the region are resting on an assumption that has not been tested.
The listing argument
Peel’s structural point is the one hardest to rebut. It notes that three shareholders control around 76% of Harworth and that the company has not raised new equity in nine years. If a listing is not being used to raise capital and the register is that concentrated, the costs of being public are being paid for very little.
Peel’s proposed alternative is that Harworth pivots to strategic land and selective development inside a private structure with lower overheads.
What to watch
Half year results land on 15 September, and they now carry considerably more weight than usual. Harworth needs them to answer Peel’s cost and returns argument directly.
The public interest in this is not about which side wins. It is that the argument is being conducted in public at all, with real numbers, about how a company that controls 15,000 Northern acres should be run. Once Harworth is private, that argument stops being visible to anyone outside it.
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