All four final bids for the council's Sunbury offices came from housebuilders, and its own sale pack sketches 27 flats. Councillors vote on 8 September.

Spelthorne Borough Council is selling two office buildings beside Sunbury station, and every bidder that reached the final round wanted to build homes on them.

The council’s own sale pack goes further. It carries a feasibility study showing 27 flats inside Elmbrook House and a house at 17 Station Road.

The disposal report goes to the Commercial Assets Sub-Committee on Monday 7 September, to the Corporate Policy and Resources Committee on Tuesday 8 September, and then to full Council on 17 September for the final decision. The report was published on 27 August and is public in full, apart from the price.

What is being sold

The two buildings are 18-19 Station Road, known as Elmbrook House, and 17 Station Road, Sunbury-on-Thames, TW16 6SU. Together they sit on 0.654 acres (0.265 hectares), under Land Registry titles SY600970 and SY699175.

  • Elmbrook House is three storeys with 82 parking spaces.
  • 17 Station Road is two storeys with four parking spaces.
  • Both are in planning use Class E, which covers offices.
  • Elmbrook House has an EPC rating of B, 17 Station Road D.

The council bought Elmbrook House in December 2016 and 17 Station Road in March 2018, as part of the commercial property buying programme that was meant to produce income to pay for services. The report is blunt about how that turned out. Both are now “underperforming assets”, and in the year to 31 March 2026 they “negatively contributed to the revenue budget with the property income insufficient to cover the operating and financing costs”.

The scale of the loss in value is in a confidential appendix, so the council has not published it. What it does say is that there is “no realistic prospect” of Elmbrook House recovering its purchase price as an office investment.

The rent tells the story

The tenancy schedule in the sale pack is public, and it shows why. Elmbrook House is let to three businesses, with one part of the ground floor empty after a lease surrender.

Space Tenant Floor area Rent a year Per sq ft Break or review
Ground floor north Vacant 2,600 sq ft - - -
Ground floor south AME Holdings Ltd 3,062 sq ft £30,620 £10.00 26 Jul 2027
First floor Ferrari Express Limited 5,843 sq ft £160,166 £27.41 20 Dec 2026
Second floor Celebrus Technologies Plc 6,581 sq ft £171,314 £26.03 9 Jan 2027
17 Station Road Desaur & Co Ltd 749 sq ft £18,000 £24.03 Review 25 Sep 2026

The 17 Station Road lease has no break clause. It has a rent review on 25 September 2026, with a fixed uplift already agreed that takes the rent to £19,000 a year.

Add those together and the two buildings bring in £380,100 a year. That is the income the report says does not cover the running and borrowing costs.

Look at the ground floor south. It is let at £10.00 a square foot, against £27.41 on the floor above and £26.03 on the floor above that. That is the “short term flexible leases on lower end rents” the report describes, and it is roughly a third of what the upper floors fetch for space in the same building.

Rent per square foot at Elmbrook House and 17 Station Road, Sunbury Bar chart of passing rent per square foot from the council's tenancy schedule: ground floor south of Elmbrook House £10.00, second floor £26.03, first floor £27.41, and 17 Station Road £24.03. One part of the ground floor is vacant. The ground floor lets for a third of the price of the floors above Passing rent per square foot, Elmbrook House and 17 Station Road, Sunbury-on-Thames. First floor £27.41 Second floor £26.03 17 Station Road £24.03 Ground floor south £10.00 Ground floor north vacant since the previous tenant surrendered its lease Total passing rent across the two buildings is £380,100 a year. All four leases sit outside the 1954 Act, so none carries security of tenure. Source: tenancy schedule in Spelthorne Borough Council's marketing brochure, Appendix 1 to the disposal report, particulars dated May 2026. Graphic by Staines Online.
Every lease is contracted out of the 1954 Act, so no tenant has an automatic right to renew.

All four leases are recorded as sitting outside the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, which means none of the tenants has an automatic right to renew when the term ends. The first break dates fall on 20 December 2026 and 9 January 2027.

Every bidder was a housebuilder

The council appointed Knight Frank after a procurement exercise to review the whole commercial portfolio and market the phase one sales. For these two buildings, it aimed the marketing at residential developers rather than office investors, on the view that this would fetch the highest price.

It did not shut office buyers out. They simply did not come. The report records that “all offers received were from residential developers”.

There were two rounds of bidding, the second on a best and final basis, and four competitive offers came in “in and around the target disposal price”. Bidder number one has been picked as the preferred bidder on five grounds:

  • the highest bid
  • a proven track record
  • an unconditional offer
  • realistic timescales for exchange and completion
  • existing funds, so no third party financing is needed

The price, the heads of terms, the schedule of bids and Knight Frank’s own recommendation are all in exempt appendices. The council argues that publishing them would prejudice its position in the negotiation.

The 27 flats are a sketch, not a planning application

The marketing brochure, published in full as Appendix 1, includes a high level feasibility study by Formation Architects. It sets out a Class MA permitted development scheme for Elmbrook House of 27 homes across 1,497 sq m (16,113 sq ft):

  • 19 one-bedroom, two-person flats
  • 3 studios
  • 3 two-bedroom, four-person flats
  • 2 two-bedroom, three-person flats

17 Station Road would become a single house.

Two things are worth saying plainly about that. First, no planning application exists. This is a feasibility study commissioned to help sell the buildings, and the brochure also floats a hotel, serviced apartments and a co-living scheme as alternatives. Second, the brochure is candid that the flats would be small: the layouts work “at minimum NDSS sizes”, the nationally described space standards floor, and it says a mix with larger units “would likely be oversized and of less good quality”.

Class MA is the prior approval route that turns offices into homes without a full planning application. It is the same route being used for Century House on Church Street in Staines, where 21 flats are proposed inside a town centre office block. Two of the borough’s larger office buildings are now heading the same way in the same month.

Why the council is selling

Spelthorne has been under government intervention since the Secretary of State issued directions on 8 May 2025. Council agreed the principle of asset rationalisation on 17 November 2025 and the programme itself in December 2025. Phase one has been marketed through the first half of this financial year, and the target is to hit an agreed level of sales receipts by 31 March 2027.

The report says the money from this sale would:

  • generate a capital receipt in 2026/27
  • reduce the council’s Capital Financing Requirement, the measure of how much it has borrowed for capital purposes
  • cut the Minimum Revenue Provision charged to council tax from 2027/28 onwards
  • end an ongoing annual loss and avoid a further fall in the buildings’ value

The wider market backdrop is in the report too. It cites sector data showing the office share of commercial property investment has fallen by 39% since 2019, and describes Station Road as one of the “secondary office locations” where take-up has collapsed and buildings sit empty for long periods.

The government-appointed Commissioners “strongly support” the sale. So does the council’s section 151 finance officer, who says it is consistent with the statutory Best Value Direction.

What happens if it does not sell

The report is unusually direct about the alternative, and the reason is that Spelthorne disappears next year into the new West Surrey Council.

If the buildings are not sold in 2026/27, they are expected to keep making a negative contribution to the revenue budget “over the next six years”. The reserves Spelthorne hands to West Surrey would then be “used up more rapidly”, which the report says would prejudice the new council’s financial resilience and is “very likely to adversely affect their ability to continue to maintain services currently provided by Spelthorne Borough Council”.

The council also flags the ordinary risk in any sale. Until contracts are exchanged, the buyer can reduce the offer or walk away.

What it means for you

If you work in one of these buildings, nothing changes on completion. A sale transfers the freehold, and the leases bind the new owner and run to their stated end dates. What is worth knowing is that all four are contracted out of the 1954 Act, so there is no automatic right to renew, and the earliest break dates are 20 December 2026 and 9 January 2027.

If you live in Sunbury, the practical question is what replaces the offices. The answer is not settled: a Class MA conversion to 27 flats is what the sale pack sketches, and it is the route the buyer would most likely take, but no application has been made and the council cannot bind a private owner to it.

If you want to follow the decision, the papers are already published. The Commercial Assets Sub-Committee meets at 1.30pm on Monday 7 September in the Council Chamber at Knowle Green, Staines-upon-Thames TW18 1XB, and questions from the public are taken under Standing Order 40. Corporate Policy and Resources votes on 8 September and full Council takes the final decision on 17 September.

The price will not be read out in public. It sits in the exempt appendices, and the public and press are excluded for that part of the meeting.

Sources

Rents per square foot and the £380,100 total are as printed in, or added up from, the council’s own tenancy schedule. Checked 30 August 2026.