A chink of light on This Land Ltd's concealed administration expenses

A freedom of information request made to This Land Ltd on 12^th July 2024 requested information about the missing admin expenses categories from the company’s 2022/23 accounts, representing £1.462m (see earlier blog on this subject here).

This Land Ltd is Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC)'s wholly owned housing subsidiary company.  This Land responded on 8^th August – one working day before the statutory deadline.  The response can be found here.  The company did provide the missing categories (see table below), and did provide copies of four external audit invoices totalling £95,000 + VAT from RSM UK Audit LLP (after the auditor agreed a £5k reduction).

But it did not provide the remainder of the requested information – namely the invoices or other information supporting the £1.462m worth of expenses that were not included in This Land’s Note 6 to the 2022/23 accounts, as identified above, plus the £833,032 remaining legal and professional fees.  This Land also did not explain why it did not provide those remaining invoices etc in its response.

A request for an internal review has therefore now been submitted to This Land, asking for the missing information.  Of particular interest is the £163,364 credit for the “Sundry” expenses category (reference N).

The FOI response does confirm that all £100k of declared audit expenses in 2022/23 (£95k after the reduction) were charged by This Land’s external auditor RSM UK Audit LLP.  However, that is not the total audit cost for This Land’s operations.

At the 27^th January 2022 meeting of CCC’s Strategy and Resources Committee, a shareholder review of This Land Ltd by independent consultancy Avison Young UK Ltd (formerly GVA Grimley Ltd) was presented. 

In that report, paragraph 2.12 on page 8 states:

“To ensure governance and terms of references are being met, following a request from CCC in 2021, an independent auditor was appointed in June 2021 to provide internal audit services for a three-year term. It is our understanding that two internal audits have recently concluded but these were not ready for review and we have therefore been unable to comment on independent reports.”

It is not clear whether This Land Ltd, or its shareholder, CCC is paying for those internal audit reports.  If the former, then those costs should be within one of the other categories above (possibly “Legal and professional fees”).  If not, CCC itself may have been paying for This Land’s internal audit expenses since June 2021, which would raise the question whether that could be regarded as CCC providing unfair state aid to its so-called arm’s length subsidiary.

The answer to that question, and This Land’s response to the request for the missing invoices will be reported on this blog in due course.