Doncaster Sheffield Airport owner Peel’s ‘highly opportunistic’ £583m bid for Harworth condemned by Yorkshire firm
Shareholders in Yorkshire-based land developer Harworth Group have been urged to reject a “highly opportunistic” £583m takeover bid from Doncaster Sheffield Airport landowner and property giant Peel.
Harworth was the property division of UK Coal, named after the Nottinghamshire village where the latter organisation was based. Now listed on the London Stock Exchange and headquartered in Rotherham, it owns, develops and manages more than 14,000 acres of land on around 100 sites across the North and Midlands.
The company has issued a formal response document following Peel’s bid last month to take over the company at an offer price of 172.5p per share. At the time of the bid, that represented a 36 per cent premium to Harworth’s volume-weighted average share price for the latest three-month period.
Harworth shares have since risen since the publication of the bid to a current value of 176.6p per share.
Peel, a long-term investor in Harworth, is seeking to take over the compaby via a subsidiary called Peel Pepper and has argued that Harworth’s assets would be “best owned, managed and developed under its full control".
Harworth’s board had already a “unanimous and unequivocal” rejection of the proposal and has now issued a more detailed response, describing the offer as “highly opportunistic”.
The statement said: “The board believes that the unrecommended offer is timed to take advantage of the current material dislocation between Harworth's share price and the value of its underlying assets, driven by macroeconomic factors affecting the UK listed real estate sector as a whole.
"If Peel Bidco acquires all of the Harworth shares, the unrecommended offer will allow Peel Bidco to extract for itself, the value upside from future returns derived from the capital invested by Harworth in its data centre and industrial and logistics pipeline over the last few years and the initiatives announced today, which are in the early stages of implementation, all at the expense of other Harworth shareholders.
"Peel Bidco also stands to benefit from expected savings on stamp duty land tax equivalent to approximately £30.7 million or 9.5 pence per Harworth share, by acquiring Harworth by way of a takeover offer (as opposed to direct property transactions), and from significant cost saving synergies, for which it is giving no demonstrable value in the unrecommended offer to the other Harworth shareholders.”
It added that the board believes the offer is not in the best interest of Harworth shareholders and urged any shareholders who have already accepted the unrecommended offer to withdraw their support “as soon as possible”.
Harworth has separately published results for the first six months of 2026, showing a £24.9m operating loss following drops in revenue and increasing administrative and IT project costs.
Chief executive Lynda Shillaw said the company has made “good operational and strategic progress during the first half of 2026 and into the second, against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop that has weighed on valuations, particularly in residential”.
She said: “Since 2021 we have successfully repositioned our land and development portfolio, shifting the weighting to 71 per cent industrial & logistics and developing a significant powered land bank, in turn positioning the business to deliver strong returns to shareholders into the medium term.
“We are well positioned to take full advantage of the compelling opportunities that lie ahead."
She added the company’s plan “will create a simpler, lower-cost and higher-returning platform to deliver future growth for Harworth shareholders”.
Peel was contacted for comment.