LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Britain's markets watchdog said on Tuesday it was optimistic there would be "decent bidders" to operate the country's first single real-time feed of bond prices after a heavyweight consortium abruptly threw in the towel in December.

Britain plans to launch the public bidding process for a "consolidated tape" operator for bond prices later this year, said Jon Relleen, director for market infrastructure at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Wall Street has long had "tapes" for stocks and bonds to increase market efficiency by making it easier for investors to find the best deals across different platforms, and the European Union is also looking to introduce them as well.

In December, a consortium of three big players in the bond market, Tradeweb, Bloomberg and MarketAxess, said it was no longer planning to jointly bid to become a bond tape operator, citing "structural complexities" and "uncertain" outcomes regarding product definitions.

"We are hopeful that we'll get some decent bidders," Relleen told a conference organised by markets industry body AFME.

He is studying "valuable new information" as he considers incentives, such as the level of fees a tape provider would pay to data suppliers.

"We're also very mindful that we're going into trying to judge those incentives. I'd be lying saying there wasn't some residual uncertainty as we go through that process," Relleen said.

He said there were inter-linkages between the tape and separate moves by the FCA to improve the quality of transparency in bond trading data, given that the value of tape would be higher if the data is better.

The FCA is also planning a tape for stock prices but this is a longer term project, Relleen said. (Reporting by Huw Jones Editing by Mark Potter)