'Poor management' of Gloucester's indoor market has left the city council short of thousands of pounds in unpaid rent.
The fishmonger at Eastgate Indoor Market – located inside Eastgate Shopping Centre – has now been asked to leave the site, with other traders also being served similar notices by Gloucester City Council, according to Carmelo Garcia, local democracy reporter.
The unpaid rent, which was revealed during public questions at a cabinet meeting this January 2026, comes with the council applying to the government for emergency funding of up to £17.5 million to keep essential services running, following years of overspending.
Gloucester businessman, Reg Daldry, put it to cabinet members that in essence, the fishmonger’s stall 'has not paid a penny rent for six years', while costing the council '£250 a week in cleaning the bins, the store and electricity'.
He asked whether the council had kept accurate records of debts owed and whether they had been taken into account when applying for government support, adding: 'Would an immediate, thorough audit of the council records and debt structures serve to highlight the poor business practice (the) council has overseen?'
Council leader, Jeremy Hilton, said he had been told the figure was around £50,000 in unpaid rent from the fishmonger.
'We have taken action to get the fishmongers to move out,' he said.
'One of the problems we’ve had in taking office is some of the ways the leases and licences were arranged and the failure of the processes within the market to deal with those who were not paying rent.
'Others who have not been covering their rent will also have been given similar notices.'
He said that when the new market is built at the site – part of the £13.8 million redevelopment of Greyfriars Quarter – the council will be 'much more rigorous in the way it is managed'.
'There will be much more robust processes in place to ask people to leave if they are not paying the due costs for servicing those market stalls.
'This is a fundamental flaw which was a hangover, frankly, from poor management by the former administration.
'The fact that members of the cabinet were going around chatting to stallholders and doing negotiations ‘I’ll fix this for you, I’ll fix that for you’, that’s one thing we have not done.
'We will be managing the new market in a very professional way. And we expect it to be a great success because everybody will be paying their rent.'
The fishmonger was approached for comment by the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
