Highview Folkestone £800k sale — Did Leo Griggs get it cheap?

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has sold the former Highview School site on Moat Farm Road for £800,000, despite the land being marketed last year at up to £1.895 million. The council says the sale will finally unlock delivery of 30 homes on a cleared, consented plot; critics argue taxpayers funded years of preparatory work only to see the uplift pass to a private buyer.

The purchaser is Highview Park Ltd(company no. 16324527). Companies House shows Leo Livingstone Griggs (pictured) as the company’s sole director. The person with significant control of Highview Park Ltd is Livingston Homes Ltd, and filings for Livingston Homes Ltd identify Mr Griggs as a person with significant control there — meaning ultimate control of the Highview vehicle rests with him.

Mr Griggs was a former local Conservative (Tory) party member and donor and is no stranger to the council’s housing and development work. Shepway Vox has previously reported that a company owned by Mr Griggs bought 15 Grace Hill for £105,000, refurbished it and later sold it to the council for £500,000; that his firm won an FHDC contract at Roman Way, Cheriton (a job which saw a duplicate payment later said by the s151 officer to have been cancelled); and that Livingston Homes Ltd purchased 12–14 Princess Street in 2018, obtained a Kent County Council “No Use Empty” loan with an FHDC top-up, and then sold the completed scheme to the council’s Housing Revenue Account in 2019 for £1,172,000. The blog’s overarching point was that public lending and purchasing have, at times, underpinned projects linked to the same developer; it also stated nothing described was unlawful. 

This site has been a public project for years. After buying the land in 2017, Folkestone & Hythe District Council set out to build a flagship, fully affordable, low-carbon scheme in-house. In early 2021 it advertised for a multidisciplinary design team to take the £5.9 million project through RIBA Stages 3–7, with a 2 February 2021 bid deadline. The brief was explicit: 30 affordable council homes on a 0.91-hectare plot already cleared of the former special school, with a mix of bungalows, houses and flats, including wheelchair-compliant dwellings. The winning team would produce technical design, tender documents, construction drawings and carry out site quality checks.

Costs rose sharply and interest rates climbed. By late 2023 the council had pivoted from direct delivery to disposal, and the tenure requirement was reset to the district minimum — 22% affordable — to make the numbers work for a buyer. The plot went to market in 2024 with full permission in place and a guide of £1.5m–£1.895m. The accepted price of £800,000 therefore undercut expectations and, crucially, followed significant public spend on demolition, surveys and professional fees to “de-risk” the scheme.

Set against that outlay, the net position to the public purse appears loss-making. The council paid to acquire the land in 2017, then funded the clearance, design and technical work that made the site shovel-ready — yet realised only £800,000 on sale. Supporters of the decision say the price reflects 2025 realities: high build costs, higher borrowing, and the obligation to deliver 30 homes (with 22% affordable) all depress land value. Detractors counter that the public underwrote the uplift and a private company now stands to capture it. Those in the industry reckon the site, even in the current climate, was worth around £1.2 million and believe it was sold too cheaply.

Public money also remains tied to the site after completion. On 15 August 2025, Highview Park Ltd granted a legal charge over the land to Kent County Council to secure a £500,000 loan facility. In plain English, KCC has lent the developer money and holds the property as security; if the borrower defaults, the county can step in to recover its funds. Combined with the earlier district-funded preparation, both tiers of local government are now financially linked to the project’s outcome.

What happens next will decide whether this was prudence or a missed opportunity. The buyer says it will deliver the permitted 30 homes to the promised standard. Residents will be looking for clear timetables, transparency on the affordable housing share, and clarity on any value-recovery mechanisms (such as overage) if sales beat forecasts. Highview has become a test case in how councils balance speed against stewardship: cash in now versus long-term public value later — and who, in the end, benefits from the groundwork taxpayers already paid for.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime