The formerWelsh schoolgirl who oversees £13bn property portfolio
HER job is to make money for the Treasury and Royal family from an enormous, ancient and varied estate worth £13bn.
Alison Nimmo is chief executive of the Crown Estate, a body which belongs to the reigning monarch “in right of The Crown”. So you could say the Queen, as head of state, is effectively her boss.
It’s been some journey to the top of an organisation which owns a remarkable amount of property that includes Regent Street in London and the Gwynt y Mor wind farm off the north coast of Wales.
In Wales, the Crown Estate also owns 66,000 acres of common land, Tintern Abbey, quarries and 1,287 miles of Welsh coastline, to name just a part of its portfolio here.
Ms Nimmo has come a long way from her school days at Bishop Gore in Swansea to what she calls the best job in property.
She was born in Scotland but raised in Wales. After graduating from Manchester University, her first job was as a planning officer with Westminster Council in 1986. She then worked for KPMG, when she worked on the rebuilding of Manchester city centre after the IRA bombing of 1996.
She also worked on the redevelopment of central Sheffield and was one of eight directors responsible for the delivery of the London 2012 Olympic Games, when she says she spent six months working “15 or 16 hour days” to meet the deadline of the opening ceremony.
It was as she was finishing the planning work for the Olympics that she saw a newspaper advert for the Crown Estate job, which she took up in January 2012, effectively working for the Treasury to make money from the estate.
“I don’t think you ever switch off from this job,” Ms Nimmo, who rarely gives interviews, told The Telegraph. “I do love it, and there is the responsibility, but it’s the best job in property by a mile. You’re always thinking about what’s next. And it’s a very special job to be custodian of all these fabulous assets.”
These assets include owning the freehold to London’s Regent Street in its entirety, where, since 2002, the Crown Estate has been implementing a £1bn investment programme.
It also owns nearly 50% of the buildings in St James’s. The portfolio there is the focus of a £500m investment plan and comprises some four million sq ft of retail, office and residential space with a value of over £1bn.
Meanwhile, deposits of gold and silver – referred to as “Mines Royal” – are owned by the Crown Estate wherever they occur in the UK and the company is also responsible for the seabed out to 12 nautical miles.
“We don’t have shareholders breathing down our neck, but the Treasury are tough taskmasters and we take great professional pride in trying to outperform the market every year,” she said.
“I feel that sense of stewardship, of passing the business on to our successors, and their successors, in better shape than we inherited it.”
Still, when she applied for the job she feared she was “too young and too female” to get it.
“We’ve done a lot in those five and a half years,” she told The Telegraph.
“Really we’ve been transforming the organisation for a while, and my role was just to come in and accelerate that.”
Part of that transformation is in its focus on wind farms, which made the company £27.7m according to its latest annual report, despite the fact the Prince of Wales has called wind farms a “horrendous blot on the landscape”.
“I think we agree about more than we disagree with the Prince of Wales,” she said. “He’s a big fan of renewable energy and that idea of stewardship.”
Every year Ms Nimmo has worked at the Crown Estates the portfolio value has increased by £1bn, rising from just over £8bn in 2012 to £13.1bn.