Farmer misses out on £3bn oil find

WHEN the City businessmen came calling and offered farmer Peveril Bruce a few thousand pounds a year to rent out one of his fields, it seemed like a good deal.

They told him they wanted to dig for oil. Amused, and sceptical about their chances of finding anything but rocks and earth, he gladly agreed.

But the joke was on Bruce. Pentex, an oil exploration company, has found £3bn-worth of black gold under his Hampshire fields - potentially the largest discovery on British soil in two decades.

The company stands to make a fortune from exploiting its find but Bruce, 50, won't be sharing in the bonanza. He has rented an acre of land on Matterley Farm, near Winchester, to the oilmen for a fixed sum thought to be between £5,000 and £10,000 a year for as long as they want to use it.

Pentex hopes to make £30m from its discovery, but Bruce's rent will increase only with inflation. Taking a break from bringing in the harvest, he told the Evening Standard: 'It's their oil, they are the ones who make the money out of it, not me. There's absolutely no way I'll be buying a chateau in France or cracking open the champagne. I wish. This is just a bog standard farm and I'm doing my best to scratch a living out of it.'

Matterley Farm has been in the family since his grandparents bought it in 1946. Bruce, who trained as an accountant, lived and worked in London until he decided to return 20 years ago to raise his family and tend the land.

Had he driven a harder bargain with Pentex he could have secured a rental fee which increased as much as £10,000 for every year or asked for a percentage of the profits.

However, he is trying to put a brave face on things. 'They can stay as long as they like. Why should I be annoyed? They are the ones who did the exploration, they are the ones who took the risk. I'll have some disturbance but you don't get rich on disturbance.'

For the time being he will have to content himself with income from the Homefields Festival, a live music event held on his land since 1998.

Gary Bardill, who negotiates with mineral companies on behalf of landowners, said Bruce could have asked for a 2%or 3% share of gross profits. 'He's not getting a brilliant deal out of it.'

But Brian Will, operations manager for Pentex Oil, said he thought the farmer had been treated fairly. 'There are standard practices within the industry.'

The company thought it had a good chance of finding oil before it approached him. It had used acoustic pulse technology to map below the surface.