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.
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.
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?
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