Part One: Alan Hodson and Hodson Developments — The Rise of the Property Business Behind Chilmington Green

This is the first of a three-part investigation into property developer Alan Derek Hodson (pictured), Hodson Developments and associated companies, prompted by the administration of Hodson Developments (Ashford) Ltd and five associated companies involved with the 5,750-home Chilmington Green development. With legal proceedings involving the National House-Building Council, Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council continuing — and an HMRC winding-up petition having preceded the liquidation of the original Hodson Developments Ltd — we’re going back more than 30 years to Ascot and Sunningdale, where the machinery behind the Hodson property business was already being assembled.

On 8 July 2025, the Commissioners for HM Revenue and Customs presented a petition in the High Court to wind up Hodson Developments Limited, saying they were creditors of the company. The hearing was listed for 20 August. Four months later, on 17 November, the company resolved that it should be voluntarily wound up and entered creditors’ voluntary liquidation. Alan Derek Hodson chaired the meeting.

It would be tempting to begin the Hodson story there.

It would also miss most of it.

By the time HMRC went to court, the original Hodson Developments had existed for nearly 32 years. Long before Chilmington Green, Alan Hodson and his wife Rosaleen Hodson had been involved in a property business operating among the wealthy residential markets of Sunningdale, Ascot and Virginia Water. The surviving corporate record shows land, luxury houses and repeated secured borrowing accumulating over years. The later Kent story didn’t spring from nowhere.

Back to Sunningdale

Hodson Developments Limited was incorporated on 6 September 1993. Alan Hodson was appointed director and company secretary that day and remained in those roles until 9 August 1999. He returned as a director on 17 March 2006. Rosaleen Hodson was also a director from incorporation; Companies House records one appointment ending on 25 August 1998 and another beginning that same day, before she ultimately resigned on 21 September 2006. The early correspondence addresses recorded for both were in Sunningdale.

The next important marker appears two years later.

On 22 December 1995, Hodson Developments entered into an assignment with The Heritable and General Investment Bank Limited. Companies House describes the security as a policy dated 6 September 1995 on the life of Alan Derek Hodson. It’s the earliest clear entry we’ve found in the company’s charge history showing a financial relationship with Heritable — a lender whose name would recur repeatedly in the years that followed.

By October 1998, that relationship had become much broader.

On 16 October 1998, Hodson Developments granted Heritable a floating charge. Companies House records that it secured all monies due or to become due from the company and covered its “undertaking and all property and assets present and future including uncalled capital.” A separate legal charge over Longcroft at Portnall Rise, Virginia Water, was created in favour of Heritable on the same day.

For anybody who doesn’t spend their evenings reading company charge registers, the distinction matters. A legal charge over a particular house or parcel of land gives the lender security over that identified asset. A floating charge of this kind reaches much more broadly across the company’s undertaking and assets.

That doesn’t mean Hodson Developments was in financial trouble.

What it does establish is that, within five years of incorporation, Heritable’s security extended well beyond the odd individual development property. It had security across the wider business as well as a separate property-specific charge — and, as the following years show, Heritable would go on to take security over a succession of Hodson properties around Ascot, Sunningdale, Virginia Water and elsewhere.

Heritable moves to the centre

Across the life of Hodson Developments, Companies House records 92 registered charges. All are now marked satisfied. They weren’t 92 defaults, and they weren’t all Heritable loans: secured borrowing is bread-and-butter finance in property development. The revealing part is not the number on its own, but the pattern underneath it. Heritable’s name keeps coming back.

By July 2001, Heritable had a charge over Fairview Court, London Road, Ascot. In July 2002 came security over Halamar at Hancocks Mount in Sunningdale and another property in Devenish Road. October brought Charters Mount in Devenish Road and Robinswood in Onslow Road. December added Fairways Cottage in London Road and land south of Cedar Drive at Sunningdale Station.

And it kept going.

In July 2004, Heritable registered security over April Cottage, Shrubbs Hill Lane, followed eight days later by Crispin House, Cross Road, Sunningdale. On 4 August came another charge covering 6 London Road, Ascot and Pear Tree House. Some securities disappeared relatively quickly: the April Cottage charge, for example, was marked satisfied in March 2005. Others would remain on the register for years.

Put those records together and a recognisable business emerges. Several developments were in play across the same period. Individual properties were being pledged as security while the wider company remained subject to Heritable’s floating charge. This wasn’t a picture of one builder finishing a house, banking the proceeds and only then moving to the next plot. It was a financed development operation running across numerous sites.

The scale was visible away from the company books too. A Land Registry title examined during this investigation records Alan and Rosaleen Hodson as proprietors of a leasehold flat in Mayfair acquired in 2004. Public price-paid data records the transaction at £3.25 million on 4 June 2004. That doesn’t tell us where the purchase money originated and it would be wrong to use personal property ownership as a proxy for the profitability of Hodson Developments. It does, however, provide some context for the property world in which the Hodsons were operating by the middle of the decade.

Then the development record begins producing a few bumps in the road.

When building doesn’t go to plan

At Crispin House, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) records identify Hodson Developments as developer under planning reference 03/83393 and record a £34,640 Section 106 contribution, paid in January 2006. The council had also opened enforcement case 05/00414 over “Non-compliance with conditions relating to landscaping.”

What followed was more unusual. RBWM subsequently recorded that the enforcement notice was no longer valid because the developers had “failed to build in accordance with the permission that the EN was issued under.” The council also recorded that the outstanding planning matters, including landscaping, were eventually resolved. So Crispin House is evidence of a development running into genuine planning and enforcement trouble. It isn’t evidence of Hodson being financially unable to complete it.

Elsewhere, one Hodson scheme went wrong in rather more spectacular fashion.

At The Orchard in Stone, Buckinghamshire, Hodson had retained consulting engineers GTA Civils. The Technology and Construction Court later found that the position of one proposed house had been moved materially from the architect’s layout — roughly 1.4 to 1.5 metres in one direction and 1.8 metres in another — without the change being properly brought to Hodson’s or the architect’s attention. Planning enforcement followed. The house ultimately had to be demolished and rebuilt.

There was wasted construction, demolition, replacement foundations and drainage and other expense. Hodson sued GTA for negligence and breach of contract. Crucially, Hodson won: the court rejected the allegation that it had been contributorily negligent and entered judgment against GTA for £115,457. For our purposes, The Orchard is useful precisely because it prevents hindsight taking over. Here was an expensive development failure during the Hodsons’ expansion years, but the court found the consultant liable and awarded Hodson damages.

By the middle of the 2000s, then, the picture is reasonably clear. Hodson Developments had been around for more than a decade, was running a portfolio of sites, had substantial secured-finance arrangements and had encountered the sort of planning, engineering and litigation risks that accompany development. Nothing in those events, by itself, establishes that the company was in financial distress.

Then, in October 2008, the trouble arrived somewhere else.

The lender falls

On 7 October 2008, Heritable Bank went into administration. It was the UK subsidiary of Iceland’s Landsbanki, and its failure came amid the global banking crisis. Evidence subsequently supplied to Parliament records that the Financial Services Authority concluded Heritable no longer met its threshold conditions and obtained an administration order. Its retail deposits were transferred to ING Direct the following day.

That matters to the Hodson history because this wasn’t some lender that happened to hold one forgotten mortgage. The public charge register shows Heritable repeatedly woven through Hodson Developments’ financing over more than a decade, from Alan Hodson’s life-policy assignment in 1995 and the company-wide floating charge in 1998 to the succession of Ascot and Sunningdale properties that followed.

Yet the Hodson-Heritable paper trail didn’t end when the bank fell.

On 30 September 2011, almost three years into Heritable’s administration, Companies House records Hodson Developments entering into an assignment of contract in favour of “Heritable Bank PLC (In Administration)”. The filing establishes the continuing financial arrangement; it doesn’t tell us the commercial circumstances behind it.

Then comes one of the most curious dates anywhere in Hodson’s historic charge register.

24 October 2014.

The old floating charge created in 1998 was marked satisfied that day. So was Fairview Court. So were Heritable securities over Charters Mount, Robinswood, Fairways Cottage, the Cedar Drive land, Crispin House and 6 London Road/Pear Tree House. The 2011 assignment in favour of Heritable Bank in administration was also eventually recorded as satisfied on the same date. Securities created years apart, over different assets, were being cleared from the register together.

What Companies House doesn’t tell us is why. We haven’t found a public document establishing whether 24 October 2014 marked repayment, refinancing, a portfolio settlement, release following disposals, an arrangement with Heritable’s administrators or simply the coordinated removal of historic security. A charge remaining registered for years doesn’t prove default, just as its eventual satisfaction doesn’t tell us where the money came from. The common date is an established fact; its explanation remains an open question.

And that uncertainty is where the first chapter of this story properly ends.

Heritable had fallen in 2008. Hodson Developments hadn’t. Six years later, a large collection of the old Heritable securities disappeared from its register together. By then, however, the Hodson story was already moving away from the individual houses and smaller developments of Ascot and Sunningdale towards schemes on a different scale.

One of them was Chobham Lakes.

Another, eventually, would be Chilmington Green.

In Part Two: Chobham Lakes, the Court of Appeal, the involvement of NHBC and the path to a High Court claim of around £5 million for remediation and other costs concerning what the court records simply as “a number of developments”. That claim remains litigation, not an established £5 million liability — and identifying those developments is one of the central questions in the next part.

The Shepway Vox Team

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