Howletts and Port Lympne: What the Accounts Reveal About Debt, Reserves and Redundancies

Staff at Howletts and Port Lympne are facing proposed redundancies. That would be worrying enough at any major Kent employer. What makes this story rather stranger is what their own accounts say about the year immediately before the cuts: more visitors, more overnight guests and nearly £27 million coming through the door. The parks themselves say they provide more than 550 jobs, plus roughly 100 seasonal posts each year.

Business hadn’t fallen off a cliff.

In 2024, income across The Howletts Wild Animal Trust and its trading subsidiary rose from £24.288 million to £26.963 million, an 11% increase. Howletts welcomed 167,741 day visitors, up 16.8%; Port Lympne had 157,921, up 4%; and short-break guests increased 9.8% to 75,095. Altogether, those three measures reached 400,757 visitors and guests. Occupancy rose from 79.1% to 81%, while the group’s pre-exceptional EBITDA doubled from £1 million to £2 million.

So if customers were still arriving, what’s gone wrong?

The Shepway Vox Team has examined five years of accounts for both The Aspinall Foundation and The Howletts Wild Animal Trust, alongside the latter’s Companies House filings. One point needs clearing up straight away: Companies House company number 04711904 isn’t a third Aspinall organisation. It is The Howletts Wild Animal Trust, which is both a registered charity and a charitable company. Its wholly owned subsidiary, Howletts and Port Lympne Estates Limited, carries out the commercial activities.

Follow the money and the picture changes quickly.

The extra £2.675 million of turnover in 2024 had to fight against rising costs. The Trust says the National Minimum Wage “materially” affected its wage bill, while food, drink and animal-feed costs remained under pressure. Animal and facilities costs rose another 10%. Exceptional costs connected with the continuing Charity Commission inquiry and a dispute with the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums added £184,000, after £142,000 the previous year.

The squeeze had already bitten hard in 2023. Inflation added nearly £300,000 above normal budget to the animal-feed bill alone. A long-term electricity contract had expired in September 2022 just as energy prices were soaring. Animal and facilities costs then increased by £1.7 million during 2023 while turnover grew by £1.41 million. Pre-exceptional EBITDA consequently dropped from £2.6 million to £1 million.

Then there’s payroll.

Wages and salaries increased from £11.563 million in 2023 to £11.996 million in 2024. Add National Insurance and pensions and total staff costs reached £13.402 million, up £726,000 in a year. Average full-time-equivalent staffing rose from 400 to 409, while average headcount climbed from 557 to 607.

Those numbers matter because of something sitting in plain sight in the Trust’s own risk register.

Among the highest-scoring financial risks identified by trustees was a “Significant increase in operating costs”. The proposed mitigation included a pricing review and reviewing “operational strategies, working practices and labour force”. That document predates the present redundancy proposals. It doesn’t prove which jobs management subsequently decided to review, but it shows that altering the workforce was already identified as one possible response to rising costs.

The balance sheet explains why.

At 31 December 2024, the group had £9,000 cash at bank and in hand. A year earlier it had £327,000. Against total current assets of £1.538 million stood £10.147 million of liabilities due within a year, leaving net current liabilities of £8.609 million. Overall, the consolidated group had net liabilities of £498,000. Its unrestricted funds were £502,000 in deficit when trustees say their target is approximately £2.5 million in positive unrestricted reserves to cover six months of animal care, grounds maintenance and security.

£9,000.

That figure needs treating very carefully. It doesn’t mean the parks woke up on New Year’s Day with only nine grand available to keep more than a thousand animals fed and hundreds of staff paid. Businesses have incoming receipts, overdrafts and other working-capital facilities. Around £3.109 million of current liabilities was also deferred income — essentially money already received for bookings which still had to be honoured. But cash is cash, and the accounts show just how dependent the organisation had become on continued trading and banking support.

The auditors went considerably further.

Azets issued a qualified opinion on the 2024 accounts. Their report highlighted a £498,000 deficit in consolidated general unrestricted reserves and said total bank loans, overdrafts and other loans amounted to £5.1 million, compared with £5.4 million a year earlier. Banking facilities had been confirmed only until 30 June 2026. Because that didn’t extend at least 12 months from approval of the accounts, the auditors said the position “may cast significant doubt” on the group’s ability to continue as a going concern.

That’s not the same as saying the parks were insolvent.

Trustees said they had reviewed forecasts through to December 2026 and, taking account of continued banking support, expected the charity and group to have sufficient resources to carry on. The auditor also noted there was no indication at the time that the annual rolling-over of facilities would cease. Both qualifications matter.

But buried in note 18 is perhaps the most important sentence in the whole set of accounts.

The £2.8 million bank loan had originally been repayable over three years from June 2022. It was subsequently extended to June 2026 on a rolling one-year facility because, according to the Trust, the ongoing statutory inquiry “continues to hamper our ability to arrange long term facilities.” The debt is secured by personal guarantees from Charles Filmer, Robin Birley and Damian Aspinall and a charge over Port Lympne and Howletts.

The inquiry, in other words, isn’t merely a reputational headache. According to the charity itself, it’s affecting access to long-term finance.

And that takes us backwards.

The Charity Commission first began looking into Howletts in December 2019 because of concerns over conflicts of interest and a related-party transaction. It began examining The Aspinall Foundation in July 2020. Formal statutory inquiries into both were announced on 31 March 2021. For Howletts, the Commission is examining governance, conflicts and related-party transactions; for the Foundation, its remit also includes whether there was any unauthorised trustee benefit. The regulator has repeatedly stressed that opening an inquiry isn’t itself a finding of wrongdoing.

The affair has nevertheless escalated. The 2024 Howletts accounts record Damian Aspinall as suspended in December 2024. In 2025 the Charity Commission confirmed his statutory suspension as a trustee of Howletts after what it called “fresh issues of concern”, while interim managers were appointed to The Aspinall Foundation to oversee key decisions alongside its trustees. The Commission’s inquiries remain ongoing.

Press reports have carried allegations concerning personal use of charity resources, including domestic staff, flights and cars. Those allegations remain part of an unresolved regulatory investigation and shouldn’t be presented as proven fact. What is proven by the accounts is a long history of disclosed related-party transactions.

In 2020 the Foundation paid Damian Aspinall’s wife, Victoria (pictured), £150,158 for “interior design services”, compared with £12,500 in 2019. Its accounts say the fees were paid at arm’s length and underwent a rigorous benchmarking exercise. Victoria Aspinall Limited provided another £90,000 of interior-design services in 2021.

More recently, the Foundation paid £70,046 in 2024 for office space supplied by Memina Capital Limited, up from £19,472 in 2023. Damian Aspinall is identified in the accounts as Memina’s sole director and shareholder. The Foundation also received £54,041 from him for rent on Howletts Mansion and other recharges, which it says was calculated using the lease and two independent professional rental valuations.

None of those transactions, standing alone, establishes misuse of charity funds. They do, however, explain why conflicts, related parties and possible trustee benefit are central to the regulator’s investigation.

The finances of the two charities are also knitted together more tightly than their separate legal identities might suggest.

In May 2020 The Aspinall Foundation took out a £2 million Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan and then lent the proceeds to The Howletts Wild Animal Trust. By December 2024 the outstanding balance was £875,000 and Howletts had paid £63,322 of interest during the year. The Foundation also leases land and buildings to Howletts and its subsidiary for £1 a year, and since 2018 has had a limited guarantee and indemnity agreement with Barclays covering up to £5 million of Howletts’ liabilities.

There is a wrinkle in that loan which deserves an answer. The Foundation’s accounts say that after the first year’s repayment holiday there were to be 16 quarterly capital payments of £125,000. Howletts’ accounts describe the loan as repayable from June 2021 over five years and say the final instalment falls due in June 2026. The balance was £875,000 at both the end of 2023 and the end of 2024. Those descriptions don’t obviously reconcile, and neither set of accounts clearly explains whether the repayment terms were formally changed.

There’s another accounting question. Howletts’ 2024 creditor notes show £1.215 million of “other loans” due within a year and another £292,000 due later — £1.507 million altogether. Yet the related-party note says £875,000 remained due to The Aspinall Foundation. The narrative beneath the borrowing table describes “other loans” as consisting of the Aspinall Foundation loan. On the face of the published accounts, that leaves £632,000 which isn’t clearly reconciled by that explanation. There may be a perfectly ordinary accounting reason, but the note doesn’t spell it out.

The Foundation itself isn’t skint.

It reported £32.428 million of total reserves at the end of 2024, including £7.595 million of free reserves. But the cushion has been shrinking. Total funds stood at £38.731 million at the end of 2021, fell to £35.374 million in 2022, £33.581 million in 2023 and £32.428 million in 2024. That’s £6.303 million gone from total funds in three years, although investment movements form part of those figures and they shouldn’t simply be described as trading losses.

Now bring the story back to the staff.

The latest public accounts are still for 2024. Companies House shows the next accounts, covering 2025, aren’t due until 30 September 2026. More importantly, the banking facilities which auditors highlighted ran only to 30 June this year. The public filings available now don’t tell us what happened after that date. We can’t responsibly claim the bank forced the redundancy proposals. We can say the organisation entered 2026 with negative reserves, substantial borrowing and an inquiry which it explicitly said was hampering access to long-term finance.

That’s why the unanswered questions matter. Were the banking facilities renewed after June, and on what terms? How much does management now need to strip from annual costs? How many posts are at risk? Which parts of the operation will carry the cuts? And has the financial impact of the Charity Commission investigation played any part in deciding that employees must go?

The accounts don’t yet give us those answers.

They do show that the redundancies haven’t appeared from nowhere. Long before staff were told their jobs could disappear, trustees had identified rising operating costs as a major risk and specifically contemplated reviewing the “labour force”. Behind that sat £5.1 million of borrowing, wafer-thin year-end cash, negative reserves and a dependency on annually renewed finance which the charity says has been made harder to secure by the statutory inquiry.

The parks’ own website calls their staff “one of our most important assets”. If some of those assets are now to lose their livelihoods, the people caring for the animals, serving the guests, cleaning the rooms and keeping two of Kent’s best-known attractions running deserve more than a bland restructuring line. They deserve to know precisely what changed, where the money has gone, and why — after a year in which visitor numbers and turnover were rising — it’s their jobs that have ended up in the firing line.

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The Shepway Vox Team

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