Folkestone Affordable Housing: How 14 Homes Were Lost at Stoneleigh House, Tram Road

An insolvency report, two auction catalogues and one carefully chosen council word tell a bleak story about how Folkestone lost 14 affordable homes and may yet lose the argument as well.

There are some council stories that arrive with sirens. Others shuffle in quietly carrying a lever-arch file, a failed auction catalogue and a sentence so cautiously worded it practically asks to be read twice. Stoneleigh House, on Tram Road in Folkestone, is one of those.

The latest administrators’ progress report for Sunningdale House Developments Ltd, says the freehold site was marketed by Sanderson Weatherall, later put into the Allsop auction on 18 November 2025, drew three expressions of interest, produced one formal offer, and still did not sell. A new agent, Clive Emson, has now been instructed, with the auction due at the end of March 2026. The report makes plain that the administration’s objective has still not been achieved and that the sale of Tram Road remains central to whether secured, and perhaps preferential, creditors see any money.

That alone would make Tram Road worth watching. But this is not just another awkward site with weeds, paperwork and a disappointed lender. This is the place that was supposed to help deliver 14 affordable homes. FHDC’s own Brownfield Register records Stoneleigh House, Tram Road, Folkestone, under planning reference Y16/0333/SH, describing it as “Erection of an apartment building of 14 affordable housing residential units following the demolition of Stoneleigh House”. The same register recorded the site as “Site Not Started” on 7 November 2024.

In other words, the homes were permitted, talked about, counted in official housing land records and then never built.

The market, meanwhile, has been giving its own brutally unsentimental verdict. The public Allsop material advertised Stoneleigh House for the November 2025 auction as a vacant freehold former office building and associated buildings with lapsed planning permission, at a guide price of £675,000 plus.

The current Clive Emson listing now advertises the same site, again on the administrators’ instructions, for auction ending 26 March 2026, with a guide price of £200,000 plus fees. Guide prices are not sale prices, and auction figures are not gospel. But when a site once wrapped in the language of affordable housing delivery comes back to market with a guide chopped so dramatically, it is hard not to hear the sound of value leaking out of the room.

Shepway Vox readers will know this is not a fresh mystery. The site has been sitting in the background of the Sandgate Pavilions affordable housing saga for years. Back in 2023, Shepway Vox highlighted the officer wording that the Tram Road development “cannot be tied at this time” within the section 106 obligation for the Sandgate scheme. In 2025, Shepway Vox returned to the same point in harder language: the off-site solution was never properly nailed down, the fallback money did not materialise, and 14 affordable homes in Folkestone Harbour were lost. Strip away the legal wrapping and the political clearing of throats, and that is still the central fact.

Now comes the council wording that really deserves to be held up to the light.

In correspondence supplied to Shepway Vox, FHDC says: “although this remains outstanding it does not appear that the implementation of it can be enforced by the Council.”

Not “cannot be enforced”. Not “we have obtained definitive advice that enforcement is unavailable”. Not “the obligation has expired and the matter is closed”. “Does not appear”.

That is not a full stop. That is a maybe wearing a tie.

And in local government, when a council says something only “appears” to be the case, residents are entitled to ask a few impolite but necessary questions. Appears to whom? On what legal basis? Since when? After what review? With advice from whom? And if the position is genuinely conclusive, why not say so plainly?

Because “appears” is not the language of certainty. It is the language of hedging. It leaves the door ajar. It says, in effect, that the council has a view, but perhaps not one it wants tested too hard in daylight.

That matters because the administrators’ report shows Tram Road is still live, still unsold and still material. This is not some ancient planning relic buried under dust and old agendas. The insolvency practitioners say plainly that the site remains to be sold, that the outcome from the company’s assets is still uncertain or intentionally undisclosed so as not to prejudice the future realisation of Tram Road, and that even distributions to creditors depend in part on what happens next with this site.

So here we are. Folkestone had a site with permission for 14 affordable homes. The homes were not built. The site sat there. The planning permission lapsed. The company went into administration. One auction failed. Another is now under way. And the council’s line, at least in the email supplied to us, is not a firm legal conclusion but a carefully massaged “does not appear”.

For residents, that should set alarm bells ringing. Not because every lost section 106 promise can be resurrected by sheer indignation. It cannot. But because public accountability should not vanish into a fog of verbs. If the obligation is unenforceable, the council should be able to explain crisply why. If it is only saying enforcement does not “appear” possible, then the matter is not nearly as settled as the public is being invited to assume.

The deeper problem is not just legal. It is cultural. Too many planning promises in this district seem to have been built on tomorrow. A future deed. A later fix. A mechanism to be sorted out down the line. A linkage that everyone assumes someone else will secure before the music stops. And then, somehow, the music stops, the homes do not appear, the land changes hands, the company collapses, and the public is left staring at an auction listing where affordable housing has been replaced by the modern planning phrase for civic disappointment: “lapsed planning permission”.

If there is a moral to Tram Road, it is not subtle. When councils rely on loose future arrangements instead of hard legal safeguards, ordinary residents are the ones left holding the empty site. Developers move on. Companies fail. Administrators file reports. Auctioneers print glossy catalogues. And the affordable homes the public was told about drift off into that great municipal afterlife reserved for things that were, apparently, going to happen.

FHDC can still clear some of this up. It can publish, or at least properly summarise, the legal reasoning behind that email wording. It can explain exactly what remains “outstanding”. It can set out whether any enforceable route was ever tested, considered, rejected or simply never pursued. Until then, the plain-English version of the Stoneleigh House story is harsh but hard to avoid: 14 affordable homes were lost, the site did not sell, and the council still cannot quite bring itself to say the public has definitively run out of road.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness