Oliver Davis, Dace Environmental and the £6.68m Creditor Question
shepwayvox
Kent’s new green housing fix is being sold with drone footage, widened ditches and the promise of thousands of homes. But behind the clean-river sales pitch sits a very human company trail: Oliver Davis, a fresh environmental venture in his wife’s name, and a failed housebuilding business still in liquidation with millions of pounds in creditor claims.
There’s a new miracle ditch in Kent. Not a pothole, not a drainage bodge, not another thing for someone to trip over in the dark, but an “enhanced drainage ditch” — the sort of ditch that now comes with drone footage, environmental language and the promise of getting housebuilding moving again across Ashford, Canterbury, Folkestone and Hythe, and Maidstone. Developers buy nutrient credits. The ditches filter out nitrogen and phosphorus. Planning applications get unstuck. Everyone smiles for the camera.
At the front of that story is Oliver “Ollie” Davis. KentOnline’s article says the Kent Nutrient Neutrality Scheme is being led by Dace Environmental, a company set up to “solve a very complex problem”, and describes Davis as Dace’s founder. He’s quoted saying the Bliby Wood site will mitigate about 3,500 new homes, with planning applications now being approved every week after some had been stuck since 2020.
Ashford Borough Council has been just as enthusiastic. In April 2026 it said approval had been granted for the Stodmarsh Stream Enhancement Scheme, delivered by Greenshank Environmental in partnership with Dace Environmental, and said the first phase could unlock between 3,000 and 5,000 homes, with a second phase potentially taking the total to up to 8,000. That’s not a little side project. That’s a private environmental scheme being placed right in the middle of Kent’s planning machine.
The company was incorporated on 28 March 2025. Its business is listed as environmental consulting activities. Companies House lists one active officer: Danielle Davis, appointed on incorporation. It also lists one active person with significant control: Mrs Danielle Davis, with 75% or more of the shares, 75% or more of the voting rights, and the right to appoint or remove directors. Oliver Gordon Davis is not listed as a director or person with significant control of Dace Environmental Ltd.
That doesn’t make the company unlawful. It doesn’t make the scheme bogus. It doesn’t mean councils or developers have been misled. But it does mean the paperwork and the public presentation don’t sit neatly together. On the paperwork, Dace Environmental Ltd is Danielle Davis’s company. In the public story, Oliver Davis is the man quoted, named, pictured and presented as the driving force.
The reason that matters is not marital. It’s financial.
Oliver Gordon Davis is not a man with one quiet company in the background. Companies House currently lists 20 appointments for him. They include Dace Ltd, Oliver Davis Group Ltd, Mulberry Tree Holdings Ltd, Dace Mitigation Ltd, MTH Barwick Road Ltd, Middleburg Ltd, Mulberry Fire and Security Ltd, MTH Cheriton Parc Ltd, Yew Tree Barn Ltd, CCOD (Somerfield) Ltd, CC Oliver Davis Group Ltd, Modus Homes Ltd, Mulberry Tree Property Holdings Ltd, Biggins Wood Holdings Ltd, Courtenay Trading International Ltd, Courtenay Rose Holdings Ltd, Oystergate Property Ltd, Enbrook Park Ltd, MTH St George’s Place Ltd and Oystergate Management Ltd. Quite a few of those are dissolved. Some are active. Some he has resigned from. It is, in plain English, a long trail.
The company at the heart of this story is Mulberry Tree Holdings Ltd, formerly Oliver Davis Homes Ltd. Companies House says it was incorporated in 2015, is now in liquidation, and its nature of business was development of building projects. The Gazette records the appointment of liquidators on 19 January 2024 and says the company traded as Oliver Davis Homes.
Before that liquidation, there had already been pressure. The Gazette records a winding-up petition presented on 3 November 2023 by Edmundson Electrical Limited, with a hearing listed at the Manchester Business & Property Court on 19 December 2023. The company later went into creditors’ voluntary liquidation, with Kevin Ley and Adam Henry Stephens appointed as joint liquidators.
The Companies House adds an awkward bit of early liquidation housekeeping. At the shareholders’ general meeting on 19 January 2024, a resolution was passed appointing Grace Jones and David Perkins of Parker Andrews as joint liquidators. But that was overtaken by the creditors’ decision on the same day, when Kevin Ley and Adam Henry Stephens were appointed instead. In other words, the shareholders picked one set of liquidators; the creditors picked another; the creditors won.
The latest liquidators’ report is not pretty reading. By 18 January 2026, Mulberry Tree Holdings had just £6,434.82 in liquidation cash. Against that, the report records unsecured creditor claims received of £6,680,074.57, with 38 claims received and none yet agreed. HMRC’s VAT/PAYE claim is recorded at £385,315.59. Lloyds has lodged a claim for £23,889.67. For anyone not fluent in insolvency-speak: the pot is tiny, the claims are huge, and creditors are still waiting.
And now we come to the name that makes this whole thing more than a normal “developer went bust” story: Dace.
There is Dace Environmental Ltd, the new company in Danielle Davis’s name, being publicly associated with the nutrient-credit scheme. Then there is Dace Ltd, a different company, incorporated in January 2023, where Companies House lists Oliver Gordon Davis and Rory James Brace as active directors. Dace Ltd’s registered office is now the Companies House default address in Cardiff, its accounts are overdue, its confirmation statement is overdue, and the company is marked active with an active proposal to strike off.
Dace Ltd is not just a name in a filing cabinet. It appears in the Mulberry liquidation. The liquidators’ report says Mulberry’s directors’ Statement of Affairs disclosed intercompany debtor balances of £90,497 from Dace Ltd, £23,088 from MTH St George’s Place Ltd, and £10,709 from Mulberry Fire and Security Ltd, making £124,295 in total. Mulberry Fire and Security Ltd has since been dissolved, so the liquidators say nothing will be recovered from that balance.
After what the liquidators describe as continued non-engagement from the directors of Dace Ltd and MTH St George’s Place Ltd, final letters of demand were issued. Meetings and discussions followed. The liquidators say the directors repeated that neither company could settle the balances in full. A settlement proposal of £73,181.03 was then agreed in full and final settlement of the intercompany balances — about 65% recovery.
But there’s a catch.
That proposed £73,181.03 recovery depends on a nutrient credits transaction completing. The report says a contract had been provided and reviewed, and that the proposed transaction was genuine. Completion had originally been expected in November 2025, but was delayed because of the need for sign-off and approvals from several bodies, including local planning authorities, the Environment Agency, an Internal Drainage Board, Natural England and DEFRA.
So nutrient credits are doing two jobs in this story. In the public-facing version, they are the clever green tool that unlocks stalled Kent housing sites. In the liquidation version, a nutrient-credit transaction is also the thing that may produce money for creditors of Oliver Davis’s failed former housebuilding company. That doesn’t prove anything improper. It does mean councils, developers and creditors are looking at the same word — “credits” — from very different ends of the pipe.
There are other bruises in the liquidation report. A £342,716 retention asset linked to work for Golding Homes at the former Somerfield Hospital site in Maidstone has been treated as irrecoverable after Golding Homes’ lawyers said no retention was payable. Golding Homes also submitted a counterclaim of about £5.4m for alleged losses and additional costs following what it described as the company’s repudiatory breach and insolvency.
The report also deals with a £100,000 accounts-receivable issue. Xero showed two invoices to Golding Homes, but the liquidators say there were no matching receipts in the bank statements. The directors said completion certificates had not been issued and they did not believe the sums were recoverable. Golding Homes’ solicitors said the underlying building contract had been terminated and no further payment was due. The liquidators decided it was not economic to pursue.
Then there are the assets that should make any creditor’s eyebrow move. The liquidators say certain tangible assets had not been disclosed in the directors’ Statement of Affairs. After a formal request, the directors gave details of a steel storage container and computer equipment. These were valued and sold for £800, although the sale completed after the reporting period. The liquidators also say they continue to investigate a Ford Transit van, registration YT67 YCS, including whether any proceeds may be recoverable and whether any claim may arise from its disposal.
Some things that looked like company assets turned out, according to the report, not to be company assets at all. The fixed asset register included used plant and machinery, including jackhammers and a microdigger. The liquidators say enquiries showed those items had been bought on behalf of LED Plant Ltd, which they describe as an unrelated third party, and had been wrongly recorded as company-owned.
Shepway Vox readers have seen Oliver Davis’s name before. In 2019, this site wrote about Oliver Gordon Davis as the man who sold Ross House to Folkestone & Hythe District Council for £1.8m, and noted his Companies House trail even then. In 2024, Shepway Vox returned to Davis and asked whether the property developer was in financial difficulty. The safer, current point is now sharper because it rests on later insolvency documents: Mulberry Tree Holdings is in liquidation, creditor claims run into millions, and the liquidators’ work is not finished.
None of this means Dace Environmental Ltd is not a legitimate company. None of this means the Stodmarsh scheme won’t work. None of this means developers cannot lawfully buy credits, or that councils cannot lawfully welcome a mitigation scheme. The article is not saying that. The facts say something narrower and harder to dodge: a scheme now being praised as a housing breakthrough is publicly fronted by Oliver Davis, while the company legally behind Dace Environmental is in his wife’s name and his former housebuilding company remains in liquidation with about £6.68m in unsecured claims received.
Before councils put too much public shine on this, they might want to ask a few dull questions. Dull questions are where the money usually hides. Who exactly owns and controls the company developers are dealing with? What role does Oliver Davis hold in practice, if not on the Dace Environmental Ltd Companies House officer or PSC pages? What due diligence has been done on the Oliver Davis company trail? What protection do developers have if credits, approvals, maintenance arrangements or long-term obligations don’t land as expected?
The answer may be perfectly innocent. Fine. Put it in writing. Publish it. Let councils, developers, residents and creditors see the structure clearly.
Because the ditch may be green.
The company trail isn’t.
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