The John Lewis Partnership has been hauled before the High Court by the past and present owners of Brent Cross shopping centre in north London, in a dispute that could redraw the lines between bricks-and-mortar leases and the digital tills that now run through them.
Hammerson, the FTSE 250 landlord that owns Brent Cross today, and Standard Life, its predecessor, allege that the employee-owned retailer has been underpaying its rent for more than a decade by failing to count click-and-collect transactions as part of its in-store takings. The claim, lodged at the High Court last December and first surfaced by the *Financial Times*, hinges on the wording of a lease drafted in 1972, four years before Brent Cross even opened its doors and decades before the world wide web entered commercial use.
John Lewis has been one of the centre’s anchor tenants since 1976. The 125-year lease it signed obliges the partnership to pay a base rent of £30,000 a year plus a turnover top-up: 0.75 per cent of sales between £4m and £10m, rising to 1 per cent on anything above £10m. Industry sources put the store’s annual takings at around £50m, which would imply a rent bill of roughly £475,000 a year, a modest sum in modern retail terms, and a reminder of just how favourable these deals could be.
Such generous arrangements were common for anchors. In the heyday of the British shopping centre, landlords routinely offered cut-price rents to the John Lewises, BHSs and Marks & Spencers of the world on the basis that their mere presence would pull in footfall, lift surrounding rents and de-risk the entire scheme. Half a century on, those legacy leases are now being stress-tested against a retail landscape their drafters could not have imagined.
At the heart of the case is the meaning of “gross receipts”. Hammerson and Standard Life argue the term should capture online orders collected at the Brent Cross store, online orders fulfilled from the store, and in-store orders dispatched later from a John Lewis delivery depot. They point to lease language that already takes in “mail, telephone or similar orders received or filled at or from” the premises, alongside orders that “originated and/or are accepted at or from the demised premises” regardless of where delivery ultimately takes place.
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