What conflict of interest?

 By Andrew Rowson

What sequence of events led to Cambridgeshire County Council's (CCC) housing development company, This Land Ltd (TLL) being allowed to dispose of land and properties it had only purchased from its shareholder two years earlier?

Since April 2020, TLL has disposed of £88 million worth of its own mortgaged property, selling it to developers without repaying the mortage principal to CCC.  In so doing, most of CCC's land security has now been lost.  That loss of security was the single biggest factor in CCC's decision a year ago, (apparently at auditor KPMG's insistance), to write off £59.85 million of unrecoverable loan debt owed by TLL, and to make a 100% impairment (i.e. write-off) of CCC's now worthless £5.85m  equity investment in This Land.

The County Council not only allowed This Land to throw away the authority's only chance of making a long-term return on its investment, it recommended it.  In April 2020, Members on the Commercial and Investment Committee agreed, by a majority, to a recommendation in a report by a senior Finance Officer to permit TLL to dispose of a number of mortgaged properties and keep the proceeds, rather than to repay the mortgage principal.  Both Officers and Members have a duty to be good stewards of taxpayers' money.  Allowing a supposedly arms-length subsidiary to throw away the Council's land security does not look like good stewardship.  This is the story of how that pivotal decision was made.

The background.

By September 2019, TLL had been in existence for three years, but had yet to sell a single house.  On 13th September 2019, CCC's Deputy s151 Officer presented an update report on This Land Financing to Members of the Commercial and Investment Committee.

The report pointed to the over £100m that This Land had already borrowed, and signalled that CCC would now need to lend substantially more to the company as it entered the development and construction phase.  No concrete figure was given, and the Committee was only asked to note and comment on the report rather than approve a specific recommendation.  

Three days later, TLL's accounts for the year to December 2018 were signed off by its auditor, RSM UK Audit LLP.  The company had made a comprensive loss of £3.9 million, which raised the company's total losses over its first two years by a factor of six.  A week later, on 24th September 2019, TLL held its AGM, and the Commercial and Investment Committee held a brief confidential meeting beforehand.  The agenda papers and minutes for that meeting have not been made public.  However, the action log for the Committee shows that at that September meeting, Committee Chairman, Cllr Joshua Schumann, was tasked with seeking legal advice on who should be allowed to serve on TLL's Board of Directors.  In particular, Committee Members were apparently unclear and needed a qualified lawyer to tell them whether it was appropriate for CCC's Chief Finance Officer and s151 Officer, Chris Malyon, to serve on This Land's Board, or whether that might be considered a conflict of interests.  Mr Malyon was the architect behind the This Land project, and in charge of the Finance and Resources Directorate, where the commercial loan interest from TLL ended up, before it was forwarded (according to Mr Malyon) to frontline services in a manner that has never been made public, and which no elected Member apparently has ever asked to see.  Up to March 2026, £45 million of interest from This Land has been paid into CCC's Finance and Resources Directorate.

The Action Log record shows that it then took a further nine months for the legal advice to arrive.  

When the C&I Committee met on 19th June 2020, Mr Malyon explained what the lawyers had said (see also here, timestamp 33:05):

"...the other key issue is around the non-exec director role, which Steve Cox and I both act as shareholder representatives on the Board, and Members of the Committee will know that the advice that we’ve received on two occasions now from external legal support has been quite candid.  In my statutory role as Section 151 Officer to the Council, there is a risk that I would be conflicted in sitting on the Board.  And, although we’ve taken steps to mitigate that in terms of the activities of this Committee by me stepping down from any issues associated with the loan structures and sale of any properties to This Land, it does put Tom Kelly, who is my Deputy Section 151 Officer obviously in a difficult position because he reports to me, and I sit on the Board of the Company.  So, we’ve always had in mind that… and have agreed that I would step down and a political representative would then be appointed by the Committee."

Companies House filings show that Mr Malyon resigned from his This Land NED role three weeks later, on 9th July 2020.

Why did it take so long?  Why was the first legal advice insufficient?  And when was that provided?  Did anything consequential take place during that nine month period?

Information about the relevant dates and which legal advisors were used is currently the subject of an FOI request.  Seven months into that nine month period marked perhaps the most critical decision about TLL's future.

Firstly, the Deputy s151 Officer's 13th September 2019 report set out that CCC Finance was contemplating lending substantially more money to This Land.  Some of the additional loans were expressly to allow the company to service its existing loan debt.  It was an admission that it could not pay its own loan interest.  What rational lender responds by lending a borrower even more money?  That only creates a spiral of dependency.

Then, on 11th March 2020, six months after Committee Members had requested the legal advice, and with still no response, HM Treasury published a consultation paper setting out the government's plans for the Public Works Loan Board to stop lending to councils for commercial yield - exactly the type of borrowing CCC had been doing to finance This Land.  The document spelled out the risks at the local level if councils borrow irresponsiby for the wrong reasons:  

"At the local level, it exposes ratepayers to the risk that the income does not materialise, leaving the local authority with an inflexible commitment to keep up with the repayments on their loans."

That warning might have been addressed to Mr Malyon.

The following month, on 24th April, CCC's Commercial & Investment Committee discussed a report in private session on an Agenda item called:  

This Land: Multi-year Business Plan, Financing & Other updates.

There is little doubt the Treasury's paper would have been discussed.  All the public could glean at the time from the public minutess of the meeting is that Members approved, by a majority to:

"receive the updated This Land Business Plan 2020 as well as to agree the other related recommendations as set out in the report."

It took a further two years, and a brief reference in another committee report for the public to understand what had been agreed in April 2020.

Paragraph 3.4. of the This Land Monitoring Update Report presented to Members of the Strategy & Resources Committee on 29th March 2022 begins:  

"In April 2020, the Commercial and Investment Committee gave permission, for the Council’s part, for This Land to sell certain listed properties releasing and varying the Council’s mortgages/legal charge and other rights and interests in those properties. At that time the listed properties focused on those identified for disposal in that phase of the business plan."

Would they have been listed for disposal so soon after This Land purchased them had it not been for that clear signal from the Treasury?  So, instead of closing down TLL in April 2020, when total losses were only £16.5 million, when additional borrowing from the PWLB  looked impossible, and when CCC could still have repossessed all the property it had sold to the company, one Committee decided in secret to let This Land begin selling its mortaged properties to developers, not to repay CCC the mortgage principal on those properties, but instead use some of the proceeds to continue paying £8.5m/year in loan interest into CCC's Finance Directorate.  As a direct result of that decision, and the land disposals that have followed every year since, This Land's losses are now £75.8m, CCC's land security is down to £20.6m, it has already had to write-off £66m of unrecoverable debt, and the figures today suggest the company will struggle to find the cash among the ruins to repay much, if any of the remaining £59.9m loan principal it still owes its shareholder.

The April 2020 report setting out the rationale for that recommendation today remains a confidential document.  It is the subject of an FOI request.  But on past experience, and despite the clear public interest in its disclosure, it may need to be escalated to the Information Commissioner's Officer before it can be made public.

Who authored the report, and does it matter?

The report's author would either be Mr Malyon himself, or more likely his then Deputy, and successor as s151 Officer, Tom Kelly.  Whoever it was, at the time Mr Malyon was still the s151 Officer, and remained a Non-Executive Director of This Land Ltd thanks to the delay in obtaining the legal advice.  If the report was written by his Deputy, how likely is it that he was not influenced by Mr Malyon, to whom he reported directly?

It is impossible to view that report and subsequent decision in terms of an arms-length commercial relationship beween CCC and TLL.  Releasing and varying the Council’s mortgages/legal charge and other rights and interests in those properties resulted in a massive cash injection for TLL and a corresponding loss for CCC, and by extension for local taxpayers.  £66 million of that loss was crystallised in March 2025.  However senior Officers and the Council Leader try to conceal its true nature, last year's loan write-off will never be recovered.

That far-reaching decision six years ago was not debated or approved by the full Council.  It raises other important questions such as - Was the decision properly informed?  Were Members aware that This Land was already in financial difficulty?  Was the decision consistent with CCC's statutory duties and financial/governance obligations?  Whoever's name was on the report, and regardless of whether the s151 Officer left the room before the matter was debated, he could not have been unaware of what was being proposed, or what was decided.  The conflict of interests seems as plain as day.

Two months after that decision, and nine months after it was sought, the legal advice arrived, and Mr Malyon resigned from his position at This Land Ltd shortly thereafter (see above).

The FOI request for the April 2020 report and associated documents, including the confidential minutes, can be found here.  Readers of this blog will be updated with any developments relating to the request.

 

How could This Land Ltd gets its figures so wrong?

By Andrew Rowson

Today, Companies House published the final audited accounts for 2025-26 of This Land Ltd, Cambridgeshire County Council's (CCC) wholly-owned housebuilding company.  The company made a comprehensive loss of £11.9m for the year, on revenue of £5.7m.  It brings This Land's total losses over ten years of operation to £75.8 million, as reported on this site last week.

Last October, in a Business Plan Monitoring Update report to elected Members serving on CCC's Shareholder Sub-Committee, the company projected revenue for the financial year of £21.3 million, with debt repayments of £8.66 million to its shareholder.

In two more Monitoring Update reports for the Committee in February and July this year, projected revenue and loan repayments declined to £12.65m and £1.9m respectively.  But even last month's report overstated This Land's actual, now audited revenue for the year by £6.915m (121%).  It is hard to understand how this could have been an innocent mistake or oversight when the latest report was published nearly four months after the end of the financial year in question.  How could This Land not know in July 2026 how much land and how many houses it had sold in the twelve months to 31st March 2026?  The three iterations of the annual projected revenue together with the actual revenue from the audited accounts are shown below.

This Land's history, from the start in 2016, is one of hopelessly optimistic projections based on little or no reliable evidence, and little or no effective governance by elected Members.  When things go wrong, CCC's automatic response seems to be to spend money on consultants to direct accountability elsewhere.  In 2021, when This Land's cumulative losses reached £20 million, CCC engaged consultancy firm Avison Young to produce a 93 page "Shareholder Review of This Land" that CCC's auditors have pointed to ever since as evidence that the Authority takes its governance role seriously.  Between November 2021 and February 2023, CCC paid Avison Young £312,127 for its services.  

Since February 2024, CCC has engaged audit firm Grant Thornton to review This Land's short term cashflow reports.  One Grant Thornton report, which was not made available to the public, can be found here.  Between February and November 2025, CCC paid Grant Thornton £231,456 for that work, including a single payment of £162,000 last November:

In the February 2026 meeting of the Shareholder Sub-Committee, Members saw the latest update of This Land's Business Plan for the 2027 financial year.  How relevant that is now in light of the company's published 2025-26 accounts is another matter.  Nevertheless, on p15 of that business plan, This Land writes: 

"Grant Thornton will be undertaking a review of the business plan and the underlying operational and financial assumptions on behalf of the shareholder, in addition to their quarterly review of operational progress through the monitoring reports."

As at today's date, CCC has not published any payment datasets beyond April this year.  But it looks as though taxpayers will continue to foot the bill for services that appear to offer no value for money to the public, but exist only to enable the Council to claim it is taking governance seriously - as measured by the amount of money it is spending on consultants.  This, and no doubt other expenditure by CCC relating to This Land is part of the hidden cost of propping up a moribund housing development company that seems to be trading whilst insolvent, since its total liabilities currently exceed its total assets by £60.1 million (2025-26 accounts, p11). 

Why didn't CCC close down This Land Ltd in 2020?

By Andrew Rowson

In the last post on this site, I explained how Cambridgeshire County Council's (CCC) wholly owned housing development company, This Land Ltd (TLL), would need to make at least £28.6m of clear profits in each of the next three financial years if it is to repay CCC just half of the £120m loan capital it owed at the end of March 2025.  31st March 2029 was the date the authority's Executive Director of Finance and Resources, Michael Hudson set last year for finally winding up the loss-making company.

On 31st March 2025, TLL and CCC entered into a loan Amendment and Restatement Agreement, in which £59.85m of its outstanding debt to CCC would be written-off, whilst the remaining £59.9m would remain, though with higher loan interest rates (9.37%) - at least initially.  That remaining half of the debt is due to be fully repaid by March 2029.  To conceal its true nature, CCC's narrative for the £59.85m loan write-off was that it was not a write-off, but a "conversion to a non-interest bearing loan", or a "capital contribution", or "capital grant".  The idea is that it will still be repayable to CCC only inasfar as there are sufficient funds available in March 2029 after This Land has discharged all its other debts and liabilities of whatever nature (see agreement, p28).  It follows that for This Land even to begin repaying that £59.65m "capital contribution", This Land will need to make at least £86 million of profit over the next three financial years, after making £75.8m of losses over the previous ten years.  A close look at the figures makes that outcome wholly unlikely, which is why CCC formally acknowledged in its final 2024-25 accounts that it was not expecting any repayments from that component, and This Land's latest business plan does not include any repayments to CCC towards the £59.85m.

The last post looked at the projected loan repayments in This Land's latest business plan for meeting its  remaining £50.9m repayment obligations.  Every one of This Land's historical business plans has been discredited for being totally unrealistic and over-optimistic.  Like its predecessors, the latest business plan projects the bulk of the repayments to come near then end of the plan.  But there is no explanation, at least to the public, of how the company will generate the profits to make even those repayments possible.

Two more statistics reinforce the implausibility of This Land meeting even half of its debt repayment obligations.

In November 2020, the last government banned councils from borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board for "debt-for-commercial yield" activity - e.g. with a view to making commercial profits on enterprises and investments outside councils' core business of delivering public services.  In March 2020, HM Treasury announced its intentions in a publicly available consultation document.  The following month, in a confidential decision that the public cannot see, CCC's Commercial and Investment Committee resolved by a majority to allow This Land to begin selling off its mortgaged properties to developers and retain the proceeds rather than repaying its lender (CCC) the loan principal (which is what happens in the real world). Conservative Members voted for the recommendations, Lib Dem and Labour Members voted against.  The only reason the public knows about that decision is because it was referred to in a report to the Strategy & Resources Committee two years later in March 2022 (see here, Agenda Item 6, paragraph 3.4), when Members resolved unanimously to allow This Land to dispose of more mortgaged properties without repaying the mortgage principal to CCC.

In both instances, in 2020 and 2022, the decisions were made because This Land needed the additional cash to stay afloat and to pay CCC the commercial interest it demanded (up to £8.5m/year).  That income, around £45 million between 2018 and March 2026, was paid into CCC's Finance & Resources Directorate supposedly to contribute towards CCC's frontline services.  But no public reconciliation exists to show how and where that cash was spent after it arrived at CCC.  Officers and Committee Members point to that income as an example of how This Land benefits CCC.  But if that £45m income comes at the cost of a £66m bad debt write-off, with additional future losses likely,  it is not a net benefit at all.  And that net loss is before one considers the loan repayments CCC has to make to the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) on the loans it took out in order to lend on to This Land for its purchases of Council-owned land.  Even at 2%/year interest, 11 years' worth of interest payments to PWLB will cost the Council around £26.4m.  If those PWLB loans were taken out for longer than 11 years (typically 25-40 years), the relevant cost to CCC and its taxpayers may continue for decades into the future.

The most visible effect of This Land disposing of those mortgaged properties is that the authority's land security against This Land defaulting on its loan repayments has been steadily eroded by the decisions recommended by CCC's current and former Chief Finance Officers (Michael Hudson, Tom Kelly, and Chris Malyon), and approved by two committees chaired by former Councillor Josh Schumann in April 2020, and by Cllr Lucy Nethsingha in March 2022.

By March 2025, £83.5 million of CCC's land security had gone, which fully explains why the Council had to write off £59.85m of unrecoverable debt in March 2025, plus £5.8m of its worthless equity investment in This Land.  The remaining £20.6m in the chart above is what remains of CCC's land security a year later, in March 2026.  That represents the remaining asset base on which TLL has to generate the unlikely profits over the next three years if Cambridgeshire taxpayers are to avoid having to pay yet more for the Council's failure to oversee and demonstrate good governance over This Land Ltd.

The erosion of CCC's land security is measured in This Land's disposals of mortgaged land since 2020-21 without repaying CCC the loan principal.  Three CCC CFOs (representing the lender) recommended the disposals, which were approved by the elected Members of the two committees mentioned above.

Up to £89m of taxpayers' money has been deliberately thrown away with those property disposals.  The 2025-26 figure (£5.73m) is This Land's total revenue in 2025-26 according to the consolidation schedules it sent to CCC.  The split between house and land sales in 2025-26 is not yet available because CCC has denied interested parties their statutory rights to inspect This Land-specific documents, which are related to CCC's group accounts.  So the precise land disposals figure for 2025-26 might be slightly lower than £5.7m.  It is fifth successive year CCC has broken the law to prevent the public from inspecting and having copies of those important documents.

In the last two financial years, This Land's revenue from the sale of houses and land has dropped precipitously to £5.69m and £5.73m respectively.  In 2024-25, the company sold just one house for £460k.  It is not yet known whether This Land sold any houses in 2025-26.  However, with This Land's interim CEO Mr Rob Williams publicly acknowledging in February this year that "we are not a housebuilder", it is likely that most of the company's 2025-26 revenue came from land disposals.

The fall in house and land sales in the last two years means that comprehensive losses in both years (in red) were more than twice as large as the company's disclosed revenue.  It is suggestive of This Land's pipeline of houses and land to sell drying up, or being tied up with procedural delays.  Historically, This Land's houses have sold for substantially less than their construction costs alone.  The table below shows that selling land is not something This Land can turn a profit on either, even before deducting the other overheads such as administrative expenses and loan interest payable.  These statistics make the prospect of This Land suddenly turning the corner and making super-massive profits between now and March 2029 even more improbable.  And yet no elected Member serving on CCC's Shareholder Sub-Committee has raised any concerns or challenged the figures they are presented with - at least not in public.

Why wasn't This Land closed down in 2020?

This Land did not sell its first house until the 15-month accounting period to March 2021, nearly five years after the company was incorporated.  By then it was already mired in debt for which it could not afford the loan interest.  Before 2020, CCC's response to TLL's appeals for cash was to lend the company yet more, which only exacerbated the problem.  But with the government's well signposted decision to stop councils like CCC borrowing more from the PWLB for their commercial initiatives, that source of funding dried up overnight.  In March 2020, following the Treasury's consultation document, CCC was faced with a stark choice.  It already knew that TLL's wildly over-optimistic projections for massive profits from housebuilding were fantastical.  Either close down the operation immediately and cut its losses (TLL's total losses then were £16.5m - now they are £75.8m), or soldier on, putting its faith in an unlikely turnaround in fortunes and bigger rewards in the future that would more than compensate for the company's rocky start.  Where was the evidence to support that rosy prospect?  It certainly was not available to the public in 2020, or in any year since then.

In April 2020, CCC's Commercial & Investment Committee nonetheless resolved in confidential session to persist with the company, and thus to put more substantial sums of public money at risk. The decision to allow This Land efecively to cannibalise itself - to dispose of its own mortgaged land so it could keep up with the interest payments to CCC and spend the remaining proceeds on admin expenses, consultants etc. was clearly reckless, and resulted in precisely the outcome the Treasury had warned about in its consultation paper only a month earlier:

"The case for this ‘debt-for-yield’ activity can be compelling for the individual

local authority. But it introduces risks locally and nationally. At the local level,

it exposes ratepayers to the risk that the income does not materialise, leaving

the local authority with an inflexible commitment to keep up with the

repayments on their loans. Within the wider public sector, it diverts money

from core services such as schools, hospitals, and roads."

The fact that CCC made a conscious decision to throw away ratepayers' security seems to indicate two things:

1) This Land could not continue its operations without further cash injections once PWLB-financed lending via CCC would no longer be available, and 

2) CCC was more focused on the uninterrupted inflow of commercial loan interest receipts into its Finance & Resources Directorate than it was on supporting and monitoring This Land as a business.  No start-up business like a housing developer with a long lead-time before it can generate income and profits could have survived the onerous burden of repaying up £8.5m/year in loan interest to its lender. Besides, This Land did not have sufficient qualified staff to process and develop £87m worth of properties all at once, and convert them into new houses to sell to the public. It was a recipe for failure.

Later in 2020, CCC made available a further £34.2m for TLL in two loan facilities (here and here).  Presumably those loans were also financed by the authority borrowing first from the PWLB in time to beat the governent's ban in November that year.  Those loans, corresponding to charges 0028 and 0029 in This Land Development Ltd's charges register on Companies House, purport to be secured on properties.  But, the loan instruments show that all but one of the properties were already associated with earlier exclusive 100% mortgage charges recorded at Companies House.  It means that several of the same properties had been mortgaged three times over.  Effectively, those 2020 loans were unsecured, and possibly unlawful.

The additional unsecured loans further increased CCC's exposure to risk.  They were executed by CCC Finance Officers, once again with the full knowledge and approval of elected Members serving on the Commercial and Investment Committee, chaired at that time by Cllr Mark Goldsack.

Taking everything into account, it would appear that CCC as a whole is unwilling or unable to admit that the This Land project has failed, and content to make further losses so long as the loan interest revenue continues to flow into the Finance and Resources directorate, all the while maintaining that the company is a going concern.  This Land Ltd's latest consolidation schedules show that the company's total liabilities exceed its total assets by £58.1 million.  After ten years of commercial operation, that does not sound like a going concern.

An independent inspection of CCC's £45m loan interest income and where it went?

It should have been clear to CCC years ago, and certainly by March 2020, that the company could not succeed because it was too small to compete, that CCC lacked knowledge and experience of the housebuilding sector, and because serious miscalculations were made about cashflow and the start-up company's ability to service a nine-figure debt burden imposed upon it practically from day one.

In light of CCC's irrational decision in 2020 to put more taxpayers' millions at risk, it may be appropriate to suggest an external examination of what happened to the £45 million of loan interest income from This Land between 2018 and March 2026 that the former Chief Finance Offficer (and This Land's founding Director) Mr Chris Malyon engineered would be paid into the Council's Finance Directorate, which he ran.  If Officers are correct in stating that those funds were subsequently redirected to the Council's frontline services: adult care, potholes etc. there should be clear evidence of that in the form of electronic audit trails and account reconciliations to vouch for all the money coming in and exactly where it went from there.  A Council that places "accountability" as the first of its core values in its Constitution should have no objection to such an exercise, and it would be a comfort for local taxpayers to know that at least some of their money has not been totally misspent.

This Land Ltd's total losses grow to £75.8 million

By Andrew Rowson

Cambridgeshire County Council's (CCC) wholly owned housing development company - This Land Ltd - recently produced its tenth set of draft accounts, to mark its first decade in business. 

The company was set up in 2016 expressly for exploiting CCC's substantial land portfolio - to provide an ongoing revenue stream for the Council in support of its frontline public services.  As Chief Finance Officer Chris Malyon wrote at the time:

"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."

It is fair to say that things have not gone as planned.  Extracts from This Land's latest draft accounts, for the year to March 2026  make for grim reading.  A comprehensive loss for the year of £11.9 million on revenue of just £5.7 million brings the company's ten-year, cumulative losses to £75.8  million.

In March 2025, CCC acknowledged that it would not receive repayment in full for the £120 million in outstanding loans it had made to This Land.  Accordingly, the authority wrote-off practically half the debt (£59.85m), together with all of its equity investment in This Land, which had become worthless.  In spite of those performance figures, CCC still insists that This Land is a going concern.  Senior Officers and Councillors, including the Leader, Cllr Lucy Nethsingha, are determined not to call last year's adjustment a bad debt write-off.  Instead, they prefer to call it a "capital grant", a "capital contribution" or a "conversion to a non-interest bearing loan".  But with no interest for This Land to pay against that £59.85m, and with both CCC and This Land recognising that that the loan principal is not expected to be repaid, it is to all intents and purposes a debt write-off, or "impairment".  That adjustment has left This Land with outstanding loan capital of £59.9 million to pay back to CCC by March 2029, together with loan interest totalling at least £30 million (including arrears).  This is how the remaining loan capital repayments are projected over the four years to March 2029.

According to This Land's draft 2025-26 accounts, the £1.9m due for repayment in the financial year just completed was indeed repaid.  That only represents 3% of the total.  The bulk of the repayments are backloaded to the last two years - a familiar pattern seen in This Land's historical business plans, all of which were later discredited for being hopelessly optimistic and unrealistic.  So, once again, the public and County Councillors serving on the Shareholder Sub-Committee may have to wait another two years before discovering whether the latest business plan is any more plausible.

The significance of March 2029 is that that is the date set by CCC's Chief Finance Officer, Mr Michael Hudson at the beginning of 2025 for winding up This Land Ltd  altogether.  Confidential papers from January and February 2025 show that Mr Hudson recommended to Members of CCC's Shareholder Sub-Committee that they reject This Land's own commercial 10-year Business Plan presented in January 2025 on the grounds that it was too optimistic and risky.  Instead, Mr Hudson recommended imposing his own, alternative "Option B" Business Plan on This Land, which he described as a "managed wind-down of the company" by 2029 or 2030, with no new property developments or investments (see January document pack, pages 13-16).  Members duly approved that plan, which is essentially what informs the repayment chart above. 

Under the "Managed wind-down" Business Plan, This Land now has to generate income and future profits sufficient to meet its loan obligations and cover other overheads over the next three financial years beginning in April 2026 - including staff costs, non-executive directors, audit fees etc.  Those administrative expenses came to £2.7m in 2025-26 (down from £3.8m in 2024-25). So, over the next three years, those costs might reach a further £8 million.

In simple terms, to repay CCC the remaining £90m (loan capital + interest) over the next three years, This Land will need to generate profits totalling £98m, less the cash it held at 31st March this year (£12.1m).  So, around £86 million in total.  That means it will need to make average profits of around £28.6m/year for the next three years until March 2029, after making nothing but substantial losses for each of the last ten years.  It is a tall order, perhaps impossibly tall.

This is what that turnaround would need to look like if Cambridgeshire taxpayers are not to lose even more than the £66 million they lost in last year's unrecoverable debt write-offs:

With This Land committed to not building any more houses, and unable to borrow any more from its sole shareholder, it is not clear where those profits will now come from.  This Land's only meaningful asset other than cash is the land it still owns after selling off £83.5 million worth of mortgaged land to real property developers between 2020-21 and 2024-25, but without repaying any of the mortgage principal to CCC.  Those disposals were made with the express written consent of the lender (CCC) following a confidential decision taken by CCC's Commercial & Investment Committee in April 2020, shortly after HM Treasury announced it was planning to place a ban on councils borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) for "commercial yield".

According to This Land's latest draft accounts, as at 31st March this year, the company's remaining tangible land assets, representing CCC's much diminished land security, fell a further £3.8m to just £20.6m.  That is the asset base from which This Land now has to conjure up £86 million of profits over the next three years if it is not to cost Cambridgeshire taxpayers even more losses. 

Accountability, respect, integrity - an open letter to the Leader of Cambridgeshire County Council

 By Andrew Rowson

Dear Cllr Nethsingha,

Shooting and silencing the messenger

In a recent response to a Subject Access Request (SAR) submitted to Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC), I learned that in the space of eleven months between May 2023 and April 2024, your Chief Executive Officer, Dr Stephen Moir, wrote to elected Members on no fewer than seven occasions, instructing them not to have any communications with me “either formally or informally”.  The first email was to you alone.  Four were sent to all Members in a group named “Members 365”.  The final two were addressed to my own County Councillor, Ros Hathorn and one other Member on each occasion.  Here is the email Dr Moir wrote to you on 22^nd May 2023:

Dr Moir’s other emails were sprinkled with demonstrably false, and possibly defamatory statements about me that he presumably thought I would never see.  That is perhaps why Cllr Hathorn lied to me the other day when she denied that the CEO had written any such emails.  The SAR response shows that Cllr Hathorn received five out of the six instructions - all bar the one above.

Back in May 2023, I expected you to reply to the letter Dr Moir referred to in his email.  It was about CCC’s and BDO’s ongoing cover-up of the alleged false accounting of City Deal government grants, that overstated the council’s usable reserves by £217.8m in the aggregate over the five years to 2019-20, and by £97.8m in 2015-16 alone.  That £97.8m overstatement in the restated 2015-16 accounts was 13 times the materiality threshold set by the auditor, BDO, and artificially embellished the usable reserves balance by 87%.  BDO audit partner Lisa Blake (née Clampin) did not flag up the false accounting, as any competent or honest auditor would have done, for the simple reason that she was complicit with CCC’s then CFO, Chris Malyon, in falsifying those and subsequent years’ accounts.  All the facts and supporting evidence are in the letter you failed to respond to.  You will remember that you and I discussed City Deal false accounting at some length when we met in Histon in November 2021.  On that occasion I left you with a detailed dossier on it, so you cannot claim not to know the details.  So, the fact that the current CEO, Dr Moir, went out of his way to recommend that you not reply to my letter I believe says something about him too.  You may be interested to know that the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) rates BDO as the worst of the big audit providers for audit quality, and that last November it fined BDO £6 million for creating false audit evidence and falsifying audit partners' signatures.  You may also be interested to know that BDO’s two statements of reasons in January 2024 to former County Councillor Mike Mason for his 2017 and 2018 objections to the accounts were both unsigned.  Lisa Blake retired from BDO two days later, on 31^st January 2024.  The BDO partner whose name appears in those statements of reasons, Ciaran McLaughlin, joined BDO just six weeks earlier.

In addition, in whitewashing the City Deal false accounting, BDO wrote in the statement of reasons:

“the Council formulated its own view on the accounting treatment, after obtaining independent financial advice from CIPFA in 2016/17, which was presented to and considered by the audit team. The audit team reviewed and agreed with the Council’s proposed treatment in 2016/17...”

That is the first time in seven years that advice from CIPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) has been mentioned in this context.  It absolutely contradicts all previous narratives in both BDO’s and CCC’s reports and statements, including this telling response from Mr Malyon to a public question from Mr Mason at the GCP Joint Assembly on 2^nd November 2017:

“In relation to the £60 million [2016-17 debtor adjustment], actually I agree with Cllr Mason….  It was actually at the auditor’s request, not ours, that that sum was recognised in our balance sheet…. So, Mr Mason, I agree with you.  But unfortunately I’m dealing with what the auditors require. If you want to challenge that with the auditors, then…[inaudible] you have my full support.”

Why didn’t Mr Malyon say “It was CIPFA who made me do it”?  The simple answer is because BDO claiming that CIPFA gave that advice in that unsigned report is in all probability a bare-faced lie, and an attempt to get itself off the hook for BDO’s key role in the false accounting.  In any event, why would CIPFA give advice that contradicts CIPFA’s own Code of Practice, in particular paragraph 2.3.2.8 on Government Grants:

“Grants and contributions relating to capital and revenue shall be accounted for on an accruals basis,” ?

In addition, each year, CCC’s CFO sets out the key accounting policies adopted in the annual Financial Statements.  In the latest draft accounts, as every year, The CFO writes:

“Revenue accounts are maintained on an accruals’ basis. Expenditure is charged to the revenue accounts in the year in which goods and services are received and, similarly, income is credited in the year to which it relates, regardless of the timing of cash payments or receipts.”

You, CIPFA, BDO, EY, KPMG, Mr Hudson and the CFOs before him all know that recognising annual grant revenue up to four years into the future, before the conditional grants are receivable or have been received is not accruals-based accounting.  That is why Mr Malyon was so keen to put the blame on the auditors in 2017, even though he alone was responsible for preparing and certifying the accounts as giving a “true and fair view” of the council’s financial position.  During those five years, CCC’s accounts were neither true, nor fair.  Instead, they contained material overstatements of usable reserves at the very time CCC was embarking on a nine-figure borrowing campaign from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) to fund its failed housing development company, This Land Ltd, only to have to write off more than half the total value of outstanding loans and investment equity (£67 million) a few years later.

CCC’s response to these and other inconvenient questions of mine has been the time-honoured one of shooting the messenger, with officers such as Dr Moir and the Monitoring Officer fabricating lies in their endless attempts to discredit and silence me.  That strategy will not work.

Also, rather than actually addressing the concrete, scrupulously-referenced documentary evidence I present in every communication to CCC, the authority ducks and dives and responds with evasive, fact-free nonsense like this from you in an earlier letter, that I suspect was drafted by an officer:

“To be clear, there are several misrepresentations in your letter of 14 February 2023 which it is not productive to address by further correspondence with you currently.”

That is not all clear.  What misrepresentations?  You won’t say.  What sort of accountability is that?  For years, the council, and elected senior Members like you have stubbornly failed to answer the important questions I ask, before making ridiculous assertions that it is I who is making unfounded allegations.  Which unfounded allegations?  Again, no specifics. 

Returning to the letter Dr Moir refers to in his email, alleging nine-figure false accounting and a universal cover-up, and backing it up with solid evidence is a matter that demands a substantive response from a council leader.  But my records show that you never responded to that letter.  Apparently you did exactly what the CEO told you to do.  That seems to be your “leadership style”.

Half a sentence in the above email has been redacted.  I cannot believe the redaction could have been to conceal legally privileged information.  From the context it also seems extremely unlikely that those few concealed words contained anyone else’s personal data, or information that did not relate to me.  Yet those are the unconvincing excuses CCC has given me for blocking out that and other passages in Dr Moir’s emails (plus in one email from Cllr Boden, Chair of the Audit & Accounts Committee).  It seems rather more likely that several, if not all those redacted passages may have been to conceal unguarded opinions about me from the CEO (and Cllr Boden), which I understand would make them my personal data.

I have asked CCC to send me the unredacted versions of Dr Moir’s emails, or else provide me with a solid legitimate exemption, properly explained, for each and every redaction in its emails.  That could take some time, and I have little doubt CCC will put up resistance all the way, as it invariably does.

However, you are a data controller in your own right, and you received the email unredacted.  As Leader, you should be setting an example and leading from the front.  Since the authority lists “accountability”, “respect” and “integrity” as the first three of its core values in Chapter A1 of its Constitution, I think it appropriate for you now to show some accountability, and send me a copy of that email, unredacted, or else explain to me the legitimate reason(s) for any redacted words.  If you do not send it, or I am not satisfied with the redaction(s), then I shall challenge it with the Local Government Ombudsman and/or the Information Commissioner, who I believe are entitled to see the unredacted email.

As a consequence of your past conduct, I am publishing this letter on my blog (publicinterestreport.blogspot.com) in the hope that it will nudge you into demonstrating some accountability and respect towards this local taxpayer.  Whether or not you respond, and whether or not you provide me with the unredacted email, readers will be informed.  For the avoidance of doubt, this is a subject access request.  The fact that I already have the email (or most of it) is not a lawful basis for refusing to disclose it.  Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, the right of access is a right to obtain confirmation of whether my personal data is being processed and, if so, to receive a copy of that personal data held by the controller.  I have discussed this with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which recommended that I send you this SAR.

One final question.  I would like you to tell me whether Dr Moir emailed you proactively on May 22^nd 2023, or whether you had contacted him first by phone or email.  From the way the email begins, it seems that Dr Moir is responding to an earlier request for advice about my letter to you.  Can you please confirm the nature of any prior communication, and if you emailed Dr Moir, please send me a copy of that email, since it too must contain my personal data.

The statutory deadline for responding to subject access requests is one calendar month.  I would be most grateful if you could respond sooner, since the request is so straightforward.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Rowson

No loss to the taxpayer? – Council tries to spin £60m debt write-off

By Andrew Rowson

Cambridgeshire County Council’s (CCC) wholly owned housing development company, This land Ltd (TLL) made comprehensive losses totalling £63.9m up to March 2025.  As a result of those losses, and as a result of This Land throwing away CCC’s loan security by disposing of £83.5m worth of its own mortgaged land without repaying the mortgage principal to CCC, the authority’s external auditor, KPMG, recognised that at least half of the loan debt owed by TLL was no longer recoverable, and that needed to be reflected in the council’s accounts.

To satisfy the auditors, CCC was obliged to write off £59.85 million of This Land’s debt, and write down (“impair”) 100% of CCC's £5.9m equity investment in TLL.  Both impairments were crystallised in CCC’s last annual accounts, the additional charges to the income and expenditure account contributing to its overall £146m rise (18.5%) in its 2024-25 cost of services.

Since then, CCC has tried to put a positive spin on writing off £66 million of taxpayers’ money it invested in This Land Ltd.

At the February 2026 Audit & Accounts Committee meeting, after putting the blame for TLL’s dismal performance on external factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the economic downturn, CCC’s Executive Director of Finance and Resources, Mr Michael Hudson, tried to argue that no taxpayers’ money had been lost as a result of the write-offs:

“But what we do recognise now is that the totality between cash from interest and cash from loans, the Council will see its full investment repaid.”   

The dishonesty of that statement is staggering.  Mr Hudson was asserting that after lending £126m to a start-up company at a commercial interest rate of around 7.35%, twelve years later, CCC might get back just £126m in the form of half the loan principal, and the rest made up of interest already received (£42.6m) and interest that might yet be received between now and 2030.  Which mortgage lender in the real world would dare say to its shareholders that no money was lost on such an arrangement?   Just over a year ago, CCC still maintained that it was on target to recover all the loan principal plus around £65 million in total interest by 2030. 

To begin with, all of that £65 million has now gone.  The interest income was baked into the council’s revenue budget.  Without it, CCC will have to make cuts to frontline services going forward, or find other savings elsewhere to replace the lost cash.   That is taxpayers’ money that has now been irretrievably lost.

Secondly, in that February meeting, Mr Hudson and the Head of Finance, Mr Stephen Howarth, conveniently forgot that the £126m loaned to TLL was not cash that had just been lying around, burning a hole in the council’s pocket.  CCC is one of the most indebted councils in the country.  In 2018 it first had to borrow that money from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) before lending it on to This Land.  Although the interest CCC pays the PWLB is much lower, at around £2% p.a., 2% of £126 million over twelve years is still £30.2 million.  That cost was not mentioned in February’s meeting.  In addition, loans from the PWLB are typically taken out for longer than twelve years, perhaps 25 years.  So, CCC may be committed to paying around £2.52m/year interest to the PWLB for several years beyond 2030.  That cost has not been factored into the equation.

Thirdly, to measure the repayment of long-term loans on a purely cashflow basis makes no sense.  If you lend a good friend £126 million, saying goodbye to the £65 million or so of contractually agreed loan interest income is bad enough.  But to receive just £126m back twelve years later takes no account of the time value of money - the “cost of capital” that measures what £126 million might have earned if it had been invested more sensibly elsewhere.

Say the cost of capital is 3%/year.  For This Land to repay just the loan with the bare minimum 3% on top would mean that CCC would need to receive around £152m evenly over those twelve years (loan principal + loan interest) in order for the arrangement to be truly “neutral” – using 2018 as the base year.  The current arrangement with TLL falls £26m short of even that target.  The total net present value of close to zero in the final column shows neutrality in real terms, after adjusting for the time value of money.

But CCC’s own obligation to pay loan interest to the PWLB cannot be excluded from the equation.  It is a relevant cost.  When it too is factored in, the break-even point for CCC’s taxpayers is higher still.

As the table below shows, using a 3% cost of capital and the fixed 2% PWLB interest charges on the £126m loan, for the loan and repayments to cover CCC’s interest payments to PWLB and be truly neutral for CCC in real terms, This Land would need to pay its shareholder a steady £15.18 million every year from 2019 to 2030 – or £182 million in total - to avoid a real world loss to the taxpayer.  This Land’s past and future projected repayments fall £56 million short of that break-even point.  If the PWLB interest payments extend beyond 2030, losses to CCC will be that much higher.  If This Land fails to repay CCC any of the remaining £60m debt or interest by 2030, that too will increase the cost borne by local taxpayers.

TLL’s substantial losses were all too predictable, and predicted, when the authority launched the company that became This Land Ltd ten years ago on the back of a flimsy, ten-page “outline business case”.  Contrary to law and contrary to the government’s guidance on councils setting up commercial companies, there was no detailed business case for This Land, and no public consultation prior to incorporation.  The paragraph below comes from page three of that 2016 prospectus,

“The nature of housing developments is that there is a significant time lag from the point at which sites are identified until the point that a revenue stream is created. One way of ensuring that revenue is received by CCC much earlier in this cycle is for CCC to establish a market loan to the HDV [Housing Development Vehicle].  The HDV needs to borrow at market rates in order to avoid state aid regulations but CCC can borrow at far more competitive rates from the Public Works Loan Board and take the margin on the loan into CCC’s revenue account. CCC will therefore gain approximately 3.0 to 3.5% on everything it lends to the HDV from the point at which the loan is made, not when sales or rents start to be received by the HDV. This will mean that the HDV will be making substantial losses for many years. This is not of concern as this will be within the financial model and long-term business plan of the HDV.”

All of TLL’s financial models and long-term business plans were found to be hopelessly unrealistic.  Some Members of that Assets & Investment Committee asked prescient questions at the time about the proposed new company.  The two passages below come from the official May 2016  minutes:

“A Member spoke in favour of the direction proposed, given his experience as a member of another property board for a LA with considerable assets.  However, he felt that the risk already highlighted of government changing legislation, and ultimately the returns to the LA reducing, was a very real one, which needed to be evaluated. He also pointed out that the simple business model presented gave the impression of “making money out of nothing”, which may appear to be the case for the Council’s revenue account, but it did have significant cashflow implications. He asked if enough was known about the Council’s future cashflow predictions, and sought reassurance that the Council would not go illiquid. Officers commented that this was a valid point, and the level indebtedness would significantly increase, albeit to an acceptable level, as construction costs would require upfront funding, and this would be reflected on the Balance Sheet.”

“A Member asked, on the basis of forecasts already undertaken on borrowing, repayments and income streams, how long it would be until there was net income. Officers advised that they did not expect the HDV to make a profit for some time, maybe even for decades, although the income for the Council would be realised straight away. Much depended on the shape and length of the development pipeline.”

Those answers from officers should have sounded alarm bells with Members.  But the Committee unanimously approved the officers’ recommendations.  Three weeks later, on 17^th June 2016, and with no further formalities, Cambridgeshire Housing and Investment Company Ltd (later renamed This Land Ltd) was incorporated and recorded at Companies House.

There is currently one remaining Councillor at CCC who attended that meeting of the former Assets & Investment Committee.  He is Cllr Chris Boden, a staunch defender of This Land, and currently Chair of CCC’s Audit & Accounts Committee.  In October 2020, when TLL’s losses were less than a quarter of what they are today, and CCC had just given TLL a further £34 million loan facility, Cllr Boden was confident the Council knew what it was doing:

“The first thing is, I think many, if not all the Committee will have had the benefit of an email from Mr Rowson that was sent yesterday concerning various other councils and their attempts to raise money through commercial and investment processes.  And I think that is actually an extremely helpful thing for all Members to read if you haven’t already read it, because it shows just how things can go wrong if they are set up in the wrong way and are not properly monitored and any problems addressed, or if attempts are made to overreach.  And I think it’s really important because this is something which Officers and Members in this Council have learned from.  We’ve learned from mistakes in some other local councils.  There have been some… I’m not going to name any specific names, but there are some dreadful ones in addition to those that have been highlighted by Mr Rowson in his email.  And we have learned from those lessons and we will make sure that we in Cambridgeshire don’t make some of the same mistakes that have been made elsewhere.”  

This Land Ltd CEO: “We are not a housebuilder”

 By Andrew Rowson

An astonishing admission last month from the CEO of Cambridgeshire County Council’s (CCC) wholly owned housebuilding company, This Land Ltd.

Rob Williams, the loss-making company’s fourth CEO in as many years was speaking to CCC’s Shareholder Sub-Committee on 17th February about This Land’s Business Strategic Review.  He told members:

“We are now clear on the right future direction for the business, which responds to the strengths of the business, but also recognises, you know, that the business is not a housebuilder.  Our strengths are around land, and how we develop, promote, create a place and bring forward land for residential delivery.  We are not a housebuilder.  We can do it, but on significant scale, we can’t compete.”

That is a far cry from the clear message ten years ago.  In May 2016, CCC’s CFO, Mr Chris Malyon, told members of the Commercial & Investment Committee that building houses on land from the council’s extensive property portfolio was the only way forward:

“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.”

It was clear from day one to any casual observer that This Land would fail as a housebuilding company.  You do not lumber a start-up business with £120m of loan debt with a 7.35% interest rate years before it can build and sell its first house.  The loan interest repayments alone came to an unaffordable £8.5m/year.  In its first nine years, the company sold just 77 houses and made a comprehensive loss of £63.9 million in the process – an average loss of £830,000 on each house sold.  Recent information from a Freedom of Information request shows that This Land’s construction costs alone over the same period came to £33.15m – 30% higher than the £25.5m revenue from selling the houses.

The ten years it took This Land and its sole shareholder to recognise the obvious resulted in CCC having to write off half of the total debt (£59.9m) owing by This Land.  That cost hit CCC’s budget and its reserves in 2024-25 and results in cuts to frontline services that could so easily have been avoided.  What took This Land so long to reach this epiphany?

-ooOoo-

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