We Need You!

 

A petition asking that ‘This Land Ltd’ receives no further funding

What is £1 million between friends? The Malta Road mystery.

By Andrew Rowson

On the Companies House website, This Land Development Ltd – one of the This Land group of companies, lists 31 charges (legal mortgages) which it claims are secured against properties purchased by This Land.  Charges with references 0001 to 0027 are all for specific properties purchased from Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC), This Land's sole shareholder.  Charge 0031 is against land in Hertfordshire that This Land bought from a third party in March 2021.

Charges 0028 and 0029 (highlighted in blue below), are both described as development charges, and are unsecured loans, though the two "legal mortgage" documents claim that the loans are secured against properties.  Those two loan facilities were given to This Land in 2020, shortly before the last government put a ban on councils borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) for commercial ventures - as CCC had been doing to fund its onward loans to This Land.  The stated purpose of the two 2020 loans is set out in section 4 of the two loan documents.  £23 million of the loans was earmarked to enable This Land to repay CCC some of the loan principal and crippling loan interest on the earlier loans that it could not afford without help because the company has never made a penny of profit, and had yet to sell its first house.  In other words, in 2020, CCC lent This Land over £40m more money so it might manage to pay its existing, unaffordable debt.  Even that assistance ultimately failed.  In some respects therefore, the 2020 loans were a Ponzi scheme.  The lender's conditions were not too onerous.  Section 4.2 in each loan document helpfully state: 

"The Lender is not obliged to monitor or verify how any amount advanced under the Agreement is used."

Charges 0001 - 0027 are all 100% mortgages secured against properties purchased from CCC, with money borrowed from CCC.  The total purchase value of those properties is £77.872m, as set out below.  CCC received capital receipts for those sales to This Land.

However, on several occasions, CCC has claimed that the  capital receipts total is £78.8m, £1 million more than the sum of charges 0001 - 0027.  For example, in his report on the latest This Land Business Plan on 24th July 2025, CCC's Executive Director of Finance and Resources, Mr Michael Hudson, informed members of the Shareholder Sub-Committee (paragraph 1.2):

"To date, This Land has paid the Council £78.8m in capital receipts and £42.6m in interest as revenue between 2017 and March 2024."

What explains the £1 million difference?  It might have been dismissed as a simple transcription error, or rounding error, until one looks at the loan documents behind charges 0028 and 0029 above that were obtained under a Freedom of Information request.  In Schedule 2, on pages 29 and 30 of each loan document is a list of the properties that supposedly provide the security for the "legal mortgages".

Each loan document shows the same ten properties, nine of which already have 100% morgages against them in earlier charges filed at Companies House.

This is problematic for several reasons:

1) The corresponding original charge documents for those nine properties (apart from the Malta Road Centre) all contain the same condition in paragraph 6.3 of their mortgage contracts:

No Security

"The charged property is free from any Security other than the Security created by this deed"  

 2) The earlier charges were all 100% mortgages.  Nine of them have now been mortgaged three times over, possibly for 300% of their value - which raises questions about the lawfulness and the enforceability of the charges in the event of default by This Land.  It also raises questions about the conduct of the officers at CCC and This Land who signed the two unsecured loans in 2020.  Both parties must have been aware that they were putting public money at risk, and possibly breaking the law.

3) There is no charge document for the Malta Road property filed at Companies House other than the two so-called development charges.

The first two points above warrant an in-depth treatment of their own, which may be the subject of a future blog post.  However, the £1 million value against the Malta Road Centre above appears to neatly explain the £1 million discrepancy between the total capital receipts acknowledged by CCC, and the £1m lower sum of the purchase prices of the properties in charges 0001 to 0027, as shown in the table above.

All This Land Development Ltd's charges are chronologically ordered, with no gaps in the numbering sequence.  So when was the Malta Road property purchased?  The Land Registry title reference leads to the Summary of Title document which can be downloaded from the Registry.  That document shows that the property was indeed purchased by This Land Development Ltd from CCC for £1 million on 30th August 2018.  If it had had a charge reference on Companies House, it would fit between 0020 and 0021.  Could its omission have been a simple oversight?  The other place that charges are registered is on the Land Registry's Summary of Title document.  All the other This Land title documents downloaded clearly show a charge between CCC and This Land Development Ltd.  Here for example is an extract from the Charges Register for 34a Station Road, March - Charge No. 0008:

But there is no such charge between CCC and This Land for the Malta Road Centre property - just two charges that pre-date This Land's purchase of the property in August 2018.

What does this mean?  It could mean that This Land has taken possession of a £1 million property free of charge.  CCC loaned This Land millions of pounds to buy the  surplus properties from CCC's extensive land portolio.  This land made the purchases, took possession of the properties and handed CCC the purchase price (the capital receipts).  The final component in the arrangement - the legal mortgage in 2018 between This Land and CCC - is missing for the Malta Road property, unless the two loans corresponding to charges 0028 and 0029 two years later can be said to be valid mortgage contracts, in spite of them doubling up and both stating that there can be no other charges against the same property.  And what is the significance of there being no reference to one or both charges in the Land Registry title document?

Several questions arise from this convoluted set of facts.  For example:

• Which party holds the title deeds to the Malta Road Centre - CCC or This Land?
• Should This Land's debt to CCC now be raised by £1 million plus the loan interest accrued over the last 7.2 years? (around £528,000 at the weighted average interest rate of 7.35%).
• Is it lawful for This Land to dispose of this property while its ownership is in doubt?
• How was it possible for CCC and This Land to overlook the Malta Road Centre's mortgage, and who was responsible?

These and other questions might be put to CCC's Shareholder Sub-Committee, which is charged with governance over This Land, on behalf of local taxpayers.

How is such incompetence possible?

 This Land Ltd loses £500,000 on a property purchased for £350,000

By Andrew Rowson

The story of 34a Station Road, March may shed some light on how Cambridgeshire County Council's wholly-owned housebuilding company has managed to lose £63.9 million in its first nine years of operation.  

In April 2018, This Land Ltd (TLL) purchased 34a Station Road, March as part of a £38.3 million portfolio of properties previously owned by Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC).  The substantial building is a former education centre, located on the same site as the March Community Centre (No. 34).  No. 34a was unused in 2018, with boarded up windows, and ripe for development in the centre of March.

As with all TLL's properties, it was purchased with a 100% mortgage loan from CCC.  The legal mortgage is filed at Companies House under This Land Development Ltd, with charge reference 0008.

Although the mortgage document is signed by both parties (CCC and TLL), the mortgage value, and hence the purchase price, is omitted.  It is not clear what effect that omission may have on the mortgage contract's validity.

To establish the purchase price one needs to obtain the historical title document from the Land Registry.  TLL paid CCC £350,000 for it on 13th April 2018.  

TLL did nothing with the property for sixteen months.  On 23rd August 2019 it submitted a planning application to Fenland District Council for a change of use to nine residential dwellings comprising one two-storey house, four 2-bed and four 1-bed flats.

Fenland District Council granted TLL planning permission on 4th February 2020, with the standard condition that development work had to begin within three years of the decision notice - i.e. by 4th February 2023.  This Land then had the option of developing the site itself, or selling it to a developer, with planning permission, which should have substantially enhanced its value.

The expectation was that This Land would develop the building, since that is what CCC set it up to do.  Here is an extract from the "Outline business case" put before CCC's Commercial and Investment Committee on 27th May 2016 for establishing a company "as a housing development vehicle (HDV) for property development":

"In view of CCC land holdings, and the currently extremely buoyant economic conditions for housing development, there is an opportunity for CCC to develop its own land rather than sell it. Simply selling sites for others to develop, and profit from, is no longer an option for CCC. The scale of the financial challenges facing CCC requires that it has to review every opportunity available to it in order to create an on-going revenue stream that can mitigate the reduction in the services that it otherwise would have to make.

 The vision is to transform CCC from being a seller of sites to being a developer of sites. CCC is therefore developing, and delivering, a series of principally residential development projects from its property portfolio across Cambridgeshire, planned over an initial 10-year timescale."

For whatever reason, TLL did not develop 34a Station Road, but waited a further three years and nine months before selling it to Gas Tech Utilities Ltd on 27th November 2023 - without planning permission - for £251,000 + VAT.  The sale price was £99,000 (28%) less than TLL had paid for it five and a half years earlier.

Only This Land can explain why it squandered the opportunity of developing or selling the property within the three year planning permission window.  In so doing, it wasted time and the fees charged for the planning application.

The new owner, a director of March-based Gas Tech Utilities Ltd, submitted an all but identical planning application on 9th January 2024.  It was granted on 19th September 2024.  The new application used the same agent as TLL, and the 2024 application was for the same conversion to nine residential dwellings.  The Land Registry currently shows five of the nine new residences on its website: 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 Grammar House, 34a Station Road, March.  No onward sales have yet been recorded.  That could be because the properties may have been let.  The purchaser is also a director of a property lettings company with the same March address as Gas Tech Utilities Ltd.

Why was the November 2023 sale price so much lower than the £350,000 TLL paid in April 2018?  One possibility is that it had been grossly over-valued by CCC's valuer Savills in 2018.  Another  is that property prices in March slumped over those five years.  That appears not to be the case, according to Nationwide's house price index calculator.  Property prices in March and East Anglia rose by 21% over that period, and by 27% between April 2018 and November 2022.  The sale price to Gas Tech Utilities Ltd in November 2024 was 41% below Nationwide's estimated market value.

A third possibility is that This Land, which has been chronically short of cash since incorporation, was squeezed by developers (who would have been aware of the company's cashflow crisis) into disposing of the property at much lower than market value.

So how much did This Land lose overall on this investment?  The relevant components are the purchase and sale prices, TLL's loan interest payable to CCC (around 7.1%), the planning application fees and associated costs, business rates, and the time value of money (cost of capital). 

If one estimates planning application costs of £60,000 in 2020 and applies a 3% cost of capital (close to the average house price increases over the same period), the discounted cash flows produce a net present value of minus £497,686 for the project in 2024 terms.

Future blog posts will feature other properties bought and sold by This Land Ltd.

I was wrong. This Land Ltd sold only one house in 2024-25

 By Andrew Rowson

Cambridgeshire County Council denies statutory information inspection rights to the public and its own elected councillors.

In the last post, I speculated that Cambridgeshire County Council's (CCC) beleaguered housebuilding subsidiary, This Land Ltd, may have made a comprehensive loss of over £1m on each of the thirteen houses it sold in 2024-25.  The calculation was based on the average sale price of  the 23 houses the company sold the previous year, and on the assumption that all, or nearly all the company's revenue that year had come from selling houses, rather than selling its own land, which historically has made up 76% of its total sales.  This Land Ltd has now published its audited financial statements for 2024-25, and the official figures are even more alarming.  This Land did not sell thirteen houses in 2024-25.  It sold just one: 61 Windmill Close, Over - for £463,543 on 24th May 2024. 

Apart from £57,000 rental income, the remaining £5.23 million sales revenue came from land sales, further depleting the company's property portfolio with which it plans to trade itself out of its current mess.  

This Land Ltd and its single shareholder, CCC, insist that the company will repay all its outstanding loans totalling £120m, plus interest (at least another £27m), by March 2029, which is now only three and a half years away.

All those repayments will have to come out of super massive profits, which the graph above shows is not This Land's forte.  In the latest accounting year, the company reported a loss of £13.63m.  Its net profit margin for the year was an impressive minus138%.  As reported in a previous post, to achieve that miraculous turnaround, This Land would need to build and sell hundreds of houses every year over the next four years, all at exceptionally high profit margins, on the small amount of land it has left after selling most of it to proper housebuilders.  The numbers clearly do not add up, and This Land's latest business plan is an arithmetic impossibility.

Riding roughshod over the law

In the circumstances, given the scale of This Land's losses and its outstanding debt, it is only reasonable for concerned members of the public and elected councillors who do not serve on the secretive Shareholder Sub-Committee to ask reasonable questions, challenge the figures we are allowed to see, and ask to see the supporting documents that might explain just how This Land plans to pull off the greatest turnaround in corporate history.  CCC is having none of it.

In July this year, I asked to inspect documents relating to This Land during the statutory 30 working days inspection period under section 26 of the Local Audit & Accountability Act 2014.  CCC's draft annual accounts include consolidated group accounts (pp144-155), which comprise CCC's and This Land's accounting records.  Section 26 states that during the inspection period, any interested person may: 

'inspect the accounting records for the financial year to which the audit relates, and all books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers, receipts and other documents relating to those records.'

That naturally includes This Land's draft accounts and all other accouting records, documents etc. relating to This Land's 2024-25 accounts, because they form an integral part of the county council's group accounts.  CCC though has a different interpretation of the law.  It asserts, without producing any evidence, that the group accounts and related documents are somehow out of scope of s26.  The senior legal officer and Monitoring Officer at the council, Ms Emma Duncan, claims to have received external legal advice to support that illogical interpretation, but has not produced any evidence of it.  I first asked Ms Duncan for that legal advice in July 2024.  She ignored the letter.  When I asked to see the evidence in July this year, the Chair of the Audit & Accounts Committee, Cllr Chris Boden, declared that it could not be produced because it might be subject to legal, professional privilege.  A Freedom of Information request was raised, which the authority should have responded to by 26th August.  Instead, it gave itself another four week extension period, citing dubious technical grounds.  The exemptions the authority claims to be relying on were challenged last month, but the authority has so far declined to address the substance of the challenge, resorting instead to its well used tactic of issuing a ludicrous threatening letter, signed on this occasion by the Monitoring Officer herself.

Elected members also denied their statutory inspection rights

As for CCC's elected councillors, many of them are just as concerned about This Land Ltd, and keen to have information that might explain exactly how the company plans to make super-massive profits in the next four years, when its house sales have all but evaporated, and without any further financing from CCC to repay all its debt and loan interest without taxpayers' money being lost.

If there is a plausible explanation, it must lie in six appendices that have been concealed from the public under Agenda Item 4 in the July 24th meeting of CCC's Shareholder Sub-Committee.

Any elected member at CCC, regardless of whether they serve on the sub-committee, is fully entitled under section 100F of the Local Government Act 1972 to inspect and have copies of any and all of those appendices.  Several councillors at CCC I understand have already asked to inspect them, but the Monitoring Officer has flatly refused their requests, apparently in breach of the statutory legislation.

Under section 5 of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, the Monitoring Officer has a legal duty to ensure councils fulfil statutory obligations and apply their codes of conduct. This includes investigating and reporting on anything the authority does that has the potential to be an illegal action or any action that might count as maladministration.  So what happens when the Monitoring Officer herself repeatedly breaches statutory obligations that should allow the public and elected members to inspect important documents relating to a wholly owned housing company that has lost £63.9 million in 9 years, sold just 77 houses, owes its shareholder £126 million (including unpaid loan interest from 2024-25) that it can never hope to repay, and which pays its chief executive £575,065 in a single year?

This Land Ltd - losing £1 million on every house sold in 2024-25?

Cambridgeshire County Council needs to come clean with taxpayers over failed housing company

By Andrew Rowson

Last December, at a meeting of the full Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC), a member of the public (Mr Guy Lachlan), asked Cllr Lucy Nethsingha about the performance of This Land Ltd, the authority’s wholly owned housing development company.  This was the council leader's reply:

“The company has enabled the building of nearly 1,000 homes, including 300 affordable homes, with plans to deliver over 4,700 more, of which around 1,700 will be affordable.  In continually assessing the value of the company, we hold regular meetings to discuss progress and performance, as well as to ensure the company is following its business plan and provide security for our loans.”

It was a highly inaccurate and misleading statement in several ways, not least in the use of the phrase “enabled the building of...”.  What the councillor meant, but did not say, is that to address This Land’s chronic lack of cash and its hopelessly over-simplified business plans, the company has sold off to developers at least £78 million worth of its own mortgaged land purchased from CCC for the express purpose of building houses on it and selling them for profit.  It was those developers, who sometimes picked up the properties for much less than they were worth, who are responsible for the 1,000 homes statistic, if even that is an accurate figure.  In all but one instance, This Land kept all the onward sale proceeds, failing to repay the County Council the mortgage principal.  That apparent breach of legal mortgage agreements between This Land and CCC largely explains why the company’s debt (before the recent debt write-offs) is £119.8m, whilst its shareholder's land security in March this year was only £24.4m.  

As for This Land itself, in the eight accounting periods to March 2024, audited accounts filed at Companies House show that it sold just 76 homes, at average prices ranging between £247,000 and £561,000 per unit per year.

The public cannot see how many houses This Land alone has built or plans to build in the future.  That information is not shown in the latest business plan published in July. It might be held in one of the confidential appendices only some county councillors have been allowed to see.  In addition, for the fourth consecutive year, CCC has denied a member of the public’s request to inspect This Land’s draft accounts during the statutory document inspection period – in breach of the law.

This Land’s 2024/25 audited accounts are unlikely to be published before the end of the year, which is only three months before the end of the 2025-26 accounting period.  In the meantime, some details about its 2024-25 performance have emerged in This Land’s accounts consolidation schedules – figures This Land produced for the County Council to construct its own consolidated group accounts.

The table above shows This Land's 2024-25 house sales in sharp decline over the last two years.  The £5.693m revenue figure for 2024-25 in fact covers house and land sales, but the consolidation schedules do not show the split.  However, the indications are that This Land may have run out of surplus land to sell to keep itself afloat.  So most, if not all that figure is likely to be house sales.  Although This Land is supposed to be a housebuilding company, historically less than a quarter of its sales revenue has come from selling houses.  In the four years to 2023-24, 76%  came from cannibalising its own mortgaged property portfolio to avoid running out of cash altogether.

If one assumes all of This Land's 2024-25 sales revenue came from selling houses, that would represent a 42% fall in house sales on the previous year.  So how many houses did This Land manage to sell in 2024-25?  The number of units is not included in the consolidation schedules, though it should be stated in the draft accounts.  If one takes the same average sale price per unit as the year before, (£427,400) that would be just 13 houses sold in This Land’s ninth year of activity.  If the average sale price in 2024-25 were higher than that, or some of the revenue related to land sales, the number of units sold would be correspondingly lower, and the loss per sale higher.  13 house sales would mean a comprehensive loss of £1.05 million for each house This Land sold in 2024-25 (£13.633m / 13) - at a time when it had to be ramping up construction and sales by at least an order of magnitude to stand any chance of meeting its loan repayment promises.  Without the £65.7m write-off, This Land will need to repay its lender, CCC £120 million of loan principal, plus at least £35 million of loan interest in the next five years - with all of those repayments having to come from house sale profits.

In March this year,  CCC wrote-off £59.85m of those loans, plus 100% of its £5.85m equity "investment" in This Land, and called the company a going-concern as a result.  At the same time, Cllr Nethsingha insisted it was not a write-off and bizarrely, that all the loans and interest will be repaid, apparently by 2030, with no new funding needed.  The new Chair of the council's Shareholder Sub-Committee, Cllr Karen Young, echoed that upbeat message in a written answer at July's full council meeting: 

"This Land themselves will continue accounting for the full repayment of the amounts lent by the Council."

Putting aside the write-off contradictions above, full repayment seems impossible given the ingredients This Land now has to work with.  At 31st March this year, the company had £11m of cash in the bank and inventory worth £46.7m, of which £24.4m was land.  To repay all loans and interest, This Land would need to convert those assets into profits of £160 million - £32m/year on average, including 2025-26.  With even an exceptionally optimistic net profit margin of 20%, (compared to the minus 183% margin in 2024-25), that means This Land's total house sales would need to be £960 million over five years, or £192m per year on average until 2030.  If one also takes a highly optimistic average unit sale price of £450,000 - (given This Land's commitment to 45% affordable houses), it means This Land would need to build and sell on average 427 houses each year until 2030:  2,135 houses in total.  Looking at the actual numbers and the direction of travel of This Land's house sales over the last three years (33, 23, 13 units), it is clear that the latest business plan, like its predecessors, is another work of fiction, apparently intended to deceive the public. 

In January this year, on local auditor KPMG's recommendation, CCC's councillors serving on the Shareholder Sub-Committee were given governance training, specifically to equip them to challenge This Land's business plans.  This was in response to KPMG's findings from its 2023-24 audit of CCC's single entity and group accounts:

"Based on our findings we have determined that there is a significant weakness in relation to arrangements for economy, efficiency and effectiveness due to the lack of expertise required to oversee and challenge commercial subsidiaries, particularly This Land."

Yet in July this year, in secret session, the Sub-Committee voted unanimously to approve This Land's revised business plan (which does recognise the huge write-off), but whose arithmetic does not begin to add up, as explained in a previous blog post.

Déjà vu

An elected member from CCC's last administration recently admitted in writing that even four years ago, This Land's assets were between £50m and £90m lower than its liabilities, and that the leadership decided it could not wind up the company immediately because that would mean CCC inheriting the debt, which would bankrupt the council.  Four years ago, This Land's official comprehensive losses were just below £20 million.  So what did CCC do?  It put its collective head in the sand, hoping that somehow things would get better.  Predictably, they got worse.  Now This Land's comprehensive losses are £63.9 million, and the authority is again ploughing on as before, losing over £1 million every month, and over £1 million per house sold.

This Land's revised business plan is a thoroughly dishonest document.  Its cashflow model at paragraph 3.5 provides no useful information.  It simply shows net flows per year, without revealing the corresponding outflows and inflows, or how many houses are due to be built and sold each year.  It does not show the expected profit margin from those sales, or explain how the company can suddenly produce healthy positive profit margins at scale, after years of profoundly negative margins.  It does not explain where This Land will obtain the cash to build the houses that are to produce the model's implausible positive net cashflows.  Nor does it explain how This Land will fit over 2,000 houses onto the remaining land from its portfolio that it has not yet sold to developers, without buying more land with more money loaned by CCC five years after the government outlawed councils borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board to fund commercial activity.

Finally, CCC has chosen to conceal six appendices to This Land's latest business plan that might shed some light on the headline figures.  It declares it is not in the public interest for the public to see that information.

Nowhere has This Land or CCC explained why This Land's house sales have shrunk by 61% in two years, or why average house prices have fluctuated so wildly from year to year.  The public has been kept totally in the dark, and we are expected to put our trust in figures that, as currently presented, make no sense at all, and also to put nearly £200 million of our money in the hands of elected members who the auditor thinks lack the expertise or the curiosity to ensure taxpayers' money is well managed.  Here is another quote from KPMG's latest year-end report to the Audit & Accounts Committee in February this year:

"We reviewed the corporate risk register and noted that there was not a specific risk associated with This Land. Given the potential risk to the Council of This Land falling further behind the business plan, we would expect there to be a risk on the Corporate Risk Register to ensure there is appropriate understanding and oversight over the risk as it may emerge."

Produce the information, or close down This Land now.

In light of This Land's rapid decline in commercial performance, the arithmetic impossibility of the latest business plan working, and the recent £65.7m write-off that was kept secret for nearly four months until after the local elections, the public is entitled to much more and better information.  In 2021 CCC chose not to close the company down for fear of bankrupting the council, when This Land's losses were less than a third of what they are now.  So there is every reason to suspect the same irrational motive for inaction persists today at CCC.  Doing nothing and hoping for the best does not reduce the risk of bankrupting the council, it magnifies it.

Local taxpayers need to see the hidden, so-called commercially sensitive appendices to the latest business plan and This Land's draft accounts for 2024-25 which should provide them with essential facts they have every right to see.  Besides, a company that has been forgiven £60m worth of debt and gifted a two-year loan interest holiday worth a further £15 million so it can carry on losing a million pounds of public money each month is clearly not operating in the same commercially competitive environment as other local housebuilders.  They would have gone bust and left the marketplace years ago had they performed as poorly.  The "commercial sensitivity" argument for CCC concealing embarrassing information therefore expired years ago.  The County Council needs to come clean and produce all the hidden facts and figures without delay, or else close the company down now in the taxpayers' interest, whatever the wider ramifications might be.  

Is this evidence of a £34 million fraud against the taxpayer?

By Andrew Rowson

Council created bogus mortgages to cover up housing company insolvency.

Since its inception in 2016, Cambridgeshire County Council’s (CCC) wholly-owned housing development company, This Land Ltd (TLL) has been loaned £133 million of taxpayers’ money by its shareholder.  To afford the loans, CCC borrowed from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB).

In the nine years since then, TLL has recorded comprehensive losses every year totalling £63.9 million up to March 2025 (2024/25 figures are subject to audit).

Over the years, TLL has repaid £13.3m of loan principal.  Those repayments were all for unsecured loans, which normally attract a higher interest rate for the borrower because of the higher financial risk for the lender.  The table below shows all loans, which reconcile with This Land Ltd’s closing borrowing balances in its financial statements (excluding the March 2025 debt write-offs - see below).

Where did the remaining loans go?

Apart from the start-up funding from the £13.34m unsecured loans (apparently repaid with cash from later loans), the £119.7m loans outstanding at 31 March 2025 were supposed to be mortgage loans, secured on former CCC-owned properties (greenfield and brownfield sites) that the council sold to This Land at market rates.  In his report on This Land’s latest business plan in July 2025, CCC Executive Director of Finance and Resources, Mr Michael Hudson writes of This Land paying the authority “£78.8m in capital receipts” for those properties.  That leaves unexplained lending of £40.9 million.  Where did that money go?

The answer lies mostly in the legal charges against This Land’s properties filed at Companies House under This Land Development Ltd.   The first 30 charges relate to purchased land assets.  Charge No. 0031 created in May 2023 is a catch-all charge on all This Land’s assets, including cash, plant and machinery etc. presumably to minimise CCC’s losses in the event of This Land’s insolvency.

The first 30 charges are tabulated below.  Their total value is £113.8m, £5.9m short of the £119.7m total loans figure, but still £35m more than the stated capital receipts figure of £78.8m.  In the absence of any other information, it could be assumed that the £5.9m represents additional money used by This Land to keep the company running, rather than for purchasing properties.  If so, on top of the £13.34m repaid loans, it would bring This Land’s start-up funding to £19.24m.

On closer examination of the legal mortgage documents, charges 0001 to 0027 (total value £77.872m) represent individual properties or packets of properties representing This Land’s portfolio of mortgaged land.  In every instance the charge value is identical to the corresponding property’s sale price to This Land in 2018 and 2019, as recorded at the Land Registry.  In other words, they are all 100% mortgages.

Charge 0030 is the only disclosed property This Land purchased from someone other than CCC.  It is a property in Hertfordshire bought from a private individual for £1.75m in March 2021.  Therefore, it does not feature among the capital receipts TLL paid to CCC.

The £77.872m represented by charges 0001 to 0027 is within £1m of Mr Hudson’s £78.8m capital receipts figure.  The difference may be down to an undisclosed additional mortaged property, a misstatement by Mr Hudson, or some other reason.  But it does not explain the remaining £34.2m difference between the total borrowing and the total charges, which seems to lie within charges 0028 and 0029 – highlighted in blue above.

Before exploring those two charges, a look at a representative charge in the 0001 to 0027 range proves instructive.

Charge reference 0010 created on 13^th April 2018 was for TLL’s purchase from CCC of the Fitzwilliam Road Hostel in Cambridge: 

TLL paid £1.1 million for the hostel, and that money came out of a larger loan facility agreement, known as “Portfolio 3” of £38.291m (see below).

The stated loan facility total is in fact slightly higher (by £1.445m) than the corresponding loan of £36.846m CCC took out from the PWLB in January 2018 (shown in yellow in the borrowing schedule table above).  Perhaps the authority added £1.445m from available funds to make up the Portfolio 3 total.

No second mortgage allowed

An important clause in every charge/mortgage document is clause 6.3 – No Security:

It means that both parties agree that the charge is the only charge on each property, and there can be no second charge against it.  That is standard practice, especially since they are 100% mortgages.  If a second charge were to be made against the same property, in the event of the borrower defaulting, the second lender would have no security over the property because of the initial charge, and the second loan would thus effectively be an unsecured loan, and possibly unlawful if it had been presented as anything else.

Charges 0028 and 0029 – double and triple counting of the same land security

Charge 0028 was created in August 2020, shortly before This Land reported devastating results in its 2019 audited financial statements.  In the calendar year to December 2019, This Land sold no houses.  Its token sales revenue was £34,407 rental income.  Its comprehensive loss for the year was £11.8m.  At the year-end it had only £3.78m in the bank, and owed CCC £5.18m in loan interest arrears that had been payable in 2019.  To compound matters, in the course of 2019 This Land borrowed a further £50m from its sole shareholder, bringing its total indebtedness to CCC at December 2019 to £96.5m.  The interest payable over the next 15-month accounting period would be in the region of £8.9 million.

At the beginning of 2020, This Land’s development pipeline also looked bleak.  During the 15-month accounting period to March 2021, TLL would sell just two houses (its first two) for £1.2m (i.e. less than a quarter of the 2019 loan interest arrears).  The company was critically short of cash.  In the background, the Treasury had published a consultation paper in March 2020 on future lending terms for councils borrowing from the PWLB.  The writing was on the wall that the unchecked cycle of CCC being able to borrow from the PWLB to lend to TLL, only to borrow more to lend to TLL so it could pay the loan interest, would soon come to an end.

Charge 0028 is different to the preceding charges.  Unlike them, the charge relates to a long list of properties, most of which apparently are set out in an “instrument” that is not accessible to the public.  However, the two named properties in the brief description below are familiar because they are properties on which CCC already had 100% charges.  The former Pru at 8 Station Road, Foxton, together with the Methodist Church at 6 Station Road is charge No. 0011 (see above), and the Fitzwilliam Road Hostel is charge No. 0010 (see above).

Charge 0028 states above that in respect of this £18.6 million mortgage (which matches the £18.6m loan dated August 2020 and highlighted in orange in the borrowing schedule table above):

“Under this deed, the Borrower [This Land Development Ltd] provides security to the Lender for the £18,600,000 made available or to be available under Facility Agreement.”

But that is impossible.  This Land cannot provide security to the same lender a second time for the same named properties in Foxton and Cambridge.  That is double counting, and possibly fraudulent.

What other properties are secured against the £18.6m mortgage?  Since the public cannot access the “instrument”, the next best thing is to scroll down the Charge 0028 page on Companies House to look for additional transactions filed against the charge.  There are seven of them, all charge release documents, with dates ranging from February 2024 to January 2025.  All the pdf documents can be downloaded and inspected.

The earliest charge release document, on 5^th February 2024, is a release of the Fitzwilliam Road Hostel charge, which is the same property, with the same Land Registry title number (CB346566) as Charge No. 0010 shown above:

An examination of all the charge release documents under Charge 0028 confirms that in every instance, the properties connected to that charge are already properties subject to one of the earlier 100% charges in the range 0001 to 0027.  Those other charges, and their release dates under Charge 0028 are shown in the Charge 28 column highlighted in blue in the charge table shown above.  From that table one can see that Charge 0010 was also released in the documents on its own Companies House page, on the same date (5^th February 2024).  That release document omits a description of the asset, but the charge code ending 0010 identifies it as the Fitzwilliam Road Hostel.

Strangely, on the charge 0010 page on Companies House, the hostel was also released in full from the charge at the earlier date of 18^th April 2023.  The property itself was sold by This Land on 24^th February 2023, as recorded at the Land Registry.  So the second charge release, a year after the property was sold, is redundant at the very least, and impossible since after the first release the property no longer belonged to This Land.

As the charge table above shows, Charge 0029 follows the same pattern as Charge 0028.  It too covers multiple filings contained in an inaccessible “instrument”.  It also has the same brief description as charge 0028:

As with charge 0028, charge 0029 also has additional transactions filed against it - eight in this case.  They too all refer to properties already held by This Land, secured by previous charges that cannot be added to.  Five properties have three 100% charges against them: 0028, 0029 and the original charge reference.  Others, like 0018 and 0024 have been released from charge 0028 and or 0029, but those charge releases have not been recorded under the original charges 0018 and 0024 themselves.

Finally, in two instances (charges 0002 and 0022), the mortgaged properties have been sold to third parties, and the sales recorded on the Land Registry, but the charges have not been released in either of the charge documents on Companies House.

A word about Charge 0029

The Charge 0029 document dated 2^nd December 2020 puts the value of that facility agreement at £15.6 million.  Yet the corresponding loan closest to that date in This Land Finance Ltd’s audited accounts is for £9.279m, with a repayment date of November 2026 (see first light blue highlighted row in the borrowing schedule table above).  So, presumably the start date was in November or December 2020.  

In July 2024, CCC’s Strategy, Resources and Performance Committee agreed in secret to lend This Land a further £5.9m and add £400,000 to the council's equity investment in TLL.  According to subsequent public documents from the Strategy, Resources and Performance Committee in October 2024, the additional loan was to come from a previously unused drawdown facility on the "last loan" (i.e. the Nov/Dec 2020 loan of £9.279m).  Later the equity investment was dropped, but the £5.9m loan went ahead.  It would have brought the loans against that agreement up to £15.179m – just £400,000 shy of the original facility agreement’s stated total of £15.6m.  The £5.9m facility amendment agreement, dated 30^th August 2024, can be viewed here.  The document refers not to the 2020 agreement, but to an amendment of an original loan facility agreement dated 11^th May 2023.  That is odd because there is no reference to a 2023 loan facility agreement on Companies House or in This Land’s or This Land Finance’s or This Land Development’s audited accounts.  This Land’s outstanding loans to CCC remained at the same £113.8m level for four years, right up to the additional £5.9m loan agreed in July 2024.

There is no reference in the amendment document to any land security as collateral for the risk to the lender of This Land defaulting on its loan obligations.  Also, the agreed interest rate of 7.1% is implausibly low for a short-term, unsecured loan to a company with no creditworthiness, no record of making profits, historical losses of over £50 million, and £113.8m of outstanding debt.  CCC's current and previous local auditors have both commented that there is a significant risk of some or all of that debt not being recoverable.  As one former county councillor implied as far back as October 2020, no rational lender would lend to This Land with its track record.  Nor should CCC have done.

Finally, following the government’s November 2020 ban on councils borrowing from the PWLB “primarily for financial return”, and the amendments to the Prudential Code in December 2021, it would appear that this unsecured loan, in addition to being reckless on CCC’s part, may also have been unlawful.

What does it all mean?

The main finding after examining This Land Development Ltd’s charges on Companies House is that in 2020, CCC and This Land twice knowingly entered into substantial commercial loan agreements that they knew to be highly irregular, if not fraudulent, and that put taxpayers' money at great risk.  At the time, it was anticipated that the government would shortly prohibit councils from borrowing from the PWLB for commercial yield.  CCC and This Land both knew that the latter's cashflow position and short to medium term commercial prospects were dire.  Others might have concluded that that was the moment to admit defeat and wind the company up.  In March 2021, This Land's official total losses were only £20 million.  Now they are £64 million.  In 2020, CCC chose instead to pump more taxpayers' money into the company, just before the government ban came into effect, in the forlorn hope that the extra cash might keep the company afloat long enough to allow it to make pie-in-the-sky mega profits at some future date.  Charges 0028 and 0029 were not loans secured on This Land’s assets that were free from other charges.  They were bogus mortgages that provided zero security to CCC or its taxpayers, and came with an extremely high risk of never being recovered.  That risk manifested itself in March this year, when Mr Hudson secretly wrote off £59.85m of This Land's debt, and all of the authority's £5.85 equity "investment".  The need for those write-offs can be traced back to 2020 and former CFO Chris Malyon's dishonest decision to prop up the zombie company with significant state aid masquerading as commercial loans secured on land assets unencumbered by other charges. 

Why did they do it?

In This Land’s 15-month financial period to March 2021, the company received cash from three sources:

•  £1.2 million from the sale of its first two houses,
• Two loans from CCC totalling £27.879 million (£18.6m + £9.279m)
• Proceeds of £18.211m from the sale of mortaged land to third parties, without TLL repaying the loan principal to CCC.

At 31^st March 2021, This Land had a cash balance of £18.33m, up from £3.78m in December 2019 (see 2020/21 accounts, p29).  Had it not been for the two bogus, unsecured loans, This Land’s bank account would have been £9.01m overdrawn.  Without the irregular loans and the proceeds from the mortgaged land disposals that year, the company’s bank account would have been £27.2m overdrawn.  It would appear that both parties have been covering up This Land’s true commercial position for nearly five years.  Every year since then, This Land has continued to dispose of mortgaged land (over £78m in total), and keeping all the proceeds, with the express written consent of CCC's CFOs, including the current Executive Director of Finance and Resources, Mr Hudson. 

The motives for this course of action seem to be two-fold:

1)      CCC officers and elected members would be prepared to do almost anything to avert and avoid reputational damage.  Pretending This Land is still a going concern is a way to kick difficult decisions into the long grass.  The same mentality exists in 2025 following CCC’s £59.85m (50%) write-off of This Land’s irrecoverable loan debt, and the council leader's insistence that it is not a write-off but a “debt rescheduling”.

2)      Even by 2020, CCC Finance had become accustomed to, and dependent on receiving substantial and growing net revenue from This Land with loan interest income at around 7.35% less loan interest payable to the PWLB at around 2%.  The net income (up to £6.2m/year), was built into CCC’s investment income budgets.  Were it to falter or fail, CCC Finance would need to compensate with savings elsewhere or make cuts to frontline services, as it now has had to do.  The finance department, and perhaps the wider council therefore had another perverse incentive not to address This Land’s declining performance and hopeless financial position, which had its origins in former CFO Chris Malyon's 2016 plan to set up a housing development company principally to bring in net loan interest revenue to the authority.  The original ten page prospectus, approved unanimously by members at the time, with no detailed business case and no public consultation, can be found here.

Who knew about it?

The list of people who were complicit, must have known, or should have known about the bogus unsecured loans in 2020 and in the five years since then, is long.  The names of This Land's senior officers can be found on Companies House.  The names below include those working for CCC with special responsibilities for governance of This Land.

 

A)      This Land Non-Executive Directors appointed by CCC

Quentin Baker: - NED - Jun 2016- Jun 2018 (CCC Monitoring Officer)

Chris Malyon: – NED – Jun 2016 – Jul 2020 (CCC CFO)

Stephen Cox: - NED - Nov 2019 – Apr 2023 (CCC Exec Director: Place & Economy)

Cllr Josh Schumann: - NED - Jul 2020 – Jul 2021

Frank Jordan: - NED – Apr 2023-  (CCC Exec Director of Place and Sustainability)

Cllr Neil Gough: - NED – Jul 2021 – May 2025

 

B)      CCC officers

Gillian Beasley: – CEO – Sep 2015 - May 2021

Stephen Moir: - CEO – May 2021 –

Chris Malyon: - CFO – Nov 2013 – Mar 2021

Tom Kelly: - CFO – Apr 2021 – Mar 2023

Michael Hudson: - Exec Director of Finance & Resources: - Mar 2023 –

Quentin Baker: - Monitoring Officer - 2009 - May 2018

Fiona McMillan: - Monitoring Officer – May 2018 – Nov 2022

Emma Duncan: - Monitoring Officer – Mar 2023 –

Mr Baker has been included above because he drew up the legal mortgage documents that allowed This Land to dispose of mortgaged properties without repaying the mortgage principal.  Mr Malyon and Mr Baker had conflicts of interest because they represented both the borrower and lender in relations between CCC and TLL.

C)     CCC elected members

Cllr Steve Count: - Council Leader and Chair of General Purposes Committee – 2014 – May 2021

Cllr Lucy Nethsingha: - Council Leader and Chair of Strategy & Resources Committee – May 2021 –

Cllr Mark Goldsack: - Chair of Commercial & Investment Committee – May 2020 – May 2021

Cllr Ros Hathorn: - Chair of Assets & Procurement Committee – Jul 2023 – May 2025

Cllr Karen Young: - Chair of Assets & Procurement Committee – May 2025 -

Cllr Mike Shellens: - Chair of Audit & Accounts Committee – 2018 – May 2021

Cllr Graham Wilson: - Chair of Audit & Accounts Committee – Dec 2020 – May 2025

Cllr Chris Boden: - Chair of Audit & Accounts Committee - May 2025 –

Where will This Land Ltd's business plan cash come from?

 By Andrew Rowson

At the July meeting of Cambridgeshire County Council’s Shareholder Sub-Committee, the latest, long-awaited business plan of the authority’s wholly-owned housing development company This Land Ltd (TLL) was revealed and approved by members.  An earlier business plan shown to councillors in January in private session was rejected.

Not all the latest plan has been revealed to the public however.  The latest business plan available to the public does not show key details such as the number of projected house sales year by year, sales revenue or the annual costs of building those houses.  Instead it just shows annual cashflows. 

The table below is the simplified cashflow model available to the public.

The bottom two sections are easy enough to understand, but the site cashflows section at the top is lacking in detail, and problematic.  Over time, operating cashflows approximate to gross profit (sales less cost of sales).  The site cashflows therefore indicate that over the six financial years to March 2030, TLL aims to make gross profits of around £88 million that will be used to pay off the 59.9m loan balance as at March 2025, though not the £59.95m that was effectively written off in March this year (see the “Conversion to Capital” reference above).  Without that write-off, TLL's outstanding debt at 31 March 2025 would have been £119.75m

In the real world, those annual site cashflows do not occur simultaneously. The expenditure involved in buying building materials and paying for the outsourced labour to build the houses must precede the cash revenues from selling the houses - often by many months.  This Land’s historical record over the last five years shows it has achieved a total gross margin of just below zero per cent.

Given that track record, it would be unrealistic to expect TLL, in its tenth year of trading suddenly to leap to a healthy gross profit margin of 30% say, especially when it has pledged to build and sell 45% of  houses as affordable homes, which have lower margins.  In light of TLL’s minus 23% gross margin in 2024/25, it is a stretch to suggest even a 10% gross margin going forward, and no evidence is available to the public to suggest it is capabe of achieving even that. 

Nevertheless, with a gross profit margin of 10% in 2025/26 (year 2 from the business plan table at the top), in order to achieve positive site cashflows of £12.6m, This Land would need to spend around ten times that sum (£126m) some time before it could collect the sales proceeds of eleven times that sum (£138.6m) - resulting in the 10% gross margin of £12.6m.  Where will it find that cash?  According to figures from This Land's consolidation accounts schedule, It had £10.9m in the bank in March 2025, and inventory with a book value of £46.7m. 

Even if it depleted all of that in 2025/26, it would still be £68.4m short of the cash it would need to achieve those 2025/26 sales.  It cannot deplete all the cash and inventory anyway because it needs to replenish both for future years.  As with all of This Land’s previous business plans, the arithmetic just does not add up.  If its gross profit margin in 2025/26 were lower, at just 5%, it would need £252m of cash to make £264.6m worth of sales to produce the same projected £12.6m positive cashflows – an even more far-fetched scenario, and impossible without significant additional funding from Cambridgeshire taxpayers.  TLL claims it will require no more funding from the council until 2030.  It has made the same claim several times before.

Moving to year 4 in Table 2 above (FY28), at a 10% gross profit margin TLL would need cash resources of £454m to achieve site cashflows of £45.4m, or £908.6m cash up front to achieve the same site cashflows with a 5% gross profit margin.  Again, where will that money come from?