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 electedd 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, 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 sales revenue it had made 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 is to spend money on consultants to direct accountability elsewhere. In 2021, when This Land's cumulative losses reached £20 million, CCC engaged consultancy 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 is taking 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 report, which was not made available to the public, can be found here. Between February and November 2025, CCC paid Grant Thornton £231,127 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 now is 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 to 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).
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