Part Two: Hodson Developments — From Building Disputes to a £5 Million NHBC Claim

In Part One, we traced Alan Hodson (pictured) and Hodson Developments from Sunningdale through decades of housebuilding, land acquisition and secured finance. Part Two follows a different paper trail: a house demolished after being built in the wrong place, planning enforcement at Crispin House, a Court of Appeal judgment over persistent heating problems at Chobham Lakes and, ultimately, an unresolved NHBC claim for around £5 million relating to what the High Court describes only as “a number of developments”. The biggest question remains unanswered in the published court record: which developments?

Property development produces disputes. Plans change, contractors make mistakes, councils enforce conditions and defects emerge. None of that, by itself, tells you that a developer is failing.

But over the years, several Hodson developments generated problems substantial enough to end up before planning enforcement officers, judges or the National House-Building Council.

And the stakes kept getting bigger.

A house in the wrong place

The first case could hardly be more tangible. In January 2000 Hodson Developments bought The Orchard, Oxford Road, Stone, in Buckinghamshire for £1.175 million, subject to further overage payments. The local planning authority was particularly concerned about one proposed dwelling, Plot 10, because of its height, mass and proximity to Oxford Road. Hodson’s architect subsequently moved the house approximately two metres further from the road as part of the attempt to address those concerns.

Planning permission for four further houses, including Plot 10, was granted on 11 June 2001. But the setting-out drawings produced by civil engineers GTA Civils didn’t leave the house where the approved architect’s drawing had placed it. GTA moved it approximately 1.4 to 1.5 metres south towards Oxford Road and around 1.8 metres east. By January 2002 the house had already been constructed to wall-plate level when council planners declared its position a breach of the planning condition. On 19 February an enforcement notice required its demolition. An appeal failed. The house came down and was rebuilt in the position required by the planning consent.

Hodson sued GTA.

The case is useful because the judgment doesn’t paint either side in convenient black and white. Judge Toulmin found Alan Hodson had taken a “hard-nosed attitude to planning requirements” and was prepared to test planning control where he thought a breach wouldn’t attract a sanction. The judgment records another planning condition at Plot 10 which Hodson had disregarded and says he preferred to make his own decisions after listening to professional advice.

But GTA tried to push that evidence considerably further. Its case was that even if Alan Hodson had been expressly told that GTA had shifted Plot 10, he would have gone ahead and built it there anyway, taking his chances with the planners. The judge rejected that argument. He found Hodson would have known this particular change was bound to attract enforcement and, had he known about it, wouldn’t have constructed the house in clear defiance of the permission. He would instead have sought agreement from the council or instructed GTA to produce drawings following the architect’s approved position.

That distinction is crucial.

The court also rejected the argument that Hodson itself should have detected the changed position when the house was pegged out. Hodson was entitled, the judge found, to assume GTA’s setting-out drawings conformed with the architect’s drawings and therefore with the planning permission. GTA was found liable.

The bill shows just how expensive moving a house by a matter of metres became. The agreed items included £29,700 in wasted construction costs, £4,900 for demolition, £20,978 for foundations and drainage and £21,288 in one-off rebuilding costs. After dealing with planning costs, management time, overheads and credits, the court entered judgment for Hodson for £115,457.

So The Orchard was a serious development problem, but it wasn’t a court finding against Hodson Developments. Quite the opposite: Hodson was the successful claimant.

That won’t be the position in the next major case.

Back to Sunningdale

At Crispin House, Cross Road, Sunningdale, the surviving council record is shorter but unusually stark. Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) records identify Hodson Developments as the developer under planning reference 03/83393, with a Section 106 payment of £34,640 made on 24 January 2006.

The council’s enforcement schedule also records case 05/00414, concerning non-compliance with landscaping conditions. A revised landscaping scheme arrived on 31 March 2006, but RBWM later 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 made clear that the planning issues, including the landscaping, were ultimately resolved.

Again, that tells us something specific and nothing more. There was a genuine planning and enforcement problem at a Hodson development. It doesn’t establish financial distress, insolvency, dishonesty or an inability to finish the development.

Chobham Lakes takes us onto much firmer — and more consequential — judicial ground.

Chobham Lakes: when the problems moved inside the homes

Chobham Lakes in Surrey was a gated development of 54 dwellings, all served by the same communal biomass central-heating and hot-water system. In January 2012 Alison Quilter exchanged contracts to buy an apartment from Hodson Developments for £240,000, completing on 19 January. Before exchange, Hodson had been asked the standard conveyancing question of whether it knew about any past or current dispute connected with the property.

Ms Quilter eventually alleged four misrepresentations. Two concerned the management company and service charges; the trial judge found there hadn’t been disputes on those matters, and that finding wasn’t appealed. The substance of the successful case was different: problems with the biomass boiler and the resulting provision of heating and hot water.

The history recorded by the Court of Appeal began before Ms Quilter bought her flat. In January 2010 residents wanted reassurance after the heating was inefficient or failed. An MCA Consulting Engineers report in February identified respects in which the system had been installed contrary to its design. Parts were ordered to enable automatic switchover if the system failed, but the Court of Appeal records that automatic switchover didn’t happen. Residents raised fresh concerns before the following winter and the system broke down three times in November 2010.

The difficulties didn’t simply disappear when winter ended. Through summer 2011 residents were still awaiting a promised site visit and inspection. There was another breakdown that November, followed by what the Court of Appeal described as acrimonious discussion: residents threatened to withhold service charges unless the heating improved, while Hodson countered that if charges were withheld no attempt would be made to repair the boiler if it broke down.

At trial, HHJ Saggerson preferred the evidence of residents Courtney Warboys and Geraint Herbert to that of Alan and Thomas Hodson. He found there had been “dogged, difficult and repeated problems” with the heating system and concluded that Alan and Thomas knew there was a continuing dispute with residents from 2010 onwards. Hodson should therefore have disclosed that dispute when answering the pre-contract enquiry, and the failure to do so amounted to a misrepresentation.

Hodson appealed on six grounds.

It lost on all six.

The Court of Appeal was careful not simply to rubber-stamp every bit of the trial judge’s language. Lord Justice Floyd said describing the system as a “catastrophe” might have exaggerated matters. But he immediately added that a heating system residents couldn’t trust to operate continuously during cold weather was, on any view, deeply unsatisfactory. The court held that the finding of a continuing dispute was plainly open to the trial judge on the evidence and shouldn’t be disturbed.

The financial result was comparatively modest. The judge assessed the apartment’s value as represented at £240,000, but its true value given the defects at £225,000, producing damages of £15,000. Ms Quilter had subsequently sold the flat for £275,000, but Hodson failed to persuade the Court of Appeal that her £35,000 increase in sale price should wipe out or reduce the damages caused by the earlier misrepresentation.

But buried in that litigation is something much more important to the story we’re following.

NHBC had already entered the picture.

The NHBC connection

The Court of Appeal records an NHBC report compiled at the beginning of 2014, when the Chobham Lakes management company — by then controlled by residents — sought to enforce the NHBC guarantee provided when the apartments were built and purchased. Hodson argued that the report came too late to prove the condition of the system when Ms Quilter bought in January 2012. The Court of Appeal nevertheless held that it was capable of supporting the trial judge’s conclusion that the biomass system had “never worked satisfactorily”.

When Ms Quilter sold her apartment in 2014, she disclosed the heating difficulties to her purchaser but was able to explain that NHBC was addressing the matter under its guarantee. In other words, more than a decade before the current £5 million proceedings emerged into the published court record, NHBC had already been involved in dealing with a warranty issue at a Hodson development.

There is an obvious temptation to join those dots.

We can’t.

Nothing in the publicly available 2025 judgment in National House-Building Council v Hodson Developments Ltd & Ors says that Chobham Lakes forms part of the current £5 million claim. Nor does that judgment identify any of the developments to which the present proceedings relate. Until the pleadings or another court document names them, saying Chobham Lakes is included would be speculation.

And that missing information brings us to the biggest question in this part of the investigation.

The £5 million question

Proceedings were commenced by NHBC in January 2024 against three defendants. The first defendant, Hodson Developments Limited, is described by the High Court as the development company. The second defendant is described only as a director of the company and the third as a former director. The published judgment doesn’t give their names.

That’s important because it corrects one assumption in our own working notes. The published judgment does not establish that the two individual defendants are Alan and Rosaleen Hodson — or, for that matter, allow us safely to identify them as anybody else. Until the Claim Form, Particulars of Claim or another authoritative court document identifies D2 and D3, we won’t put names to them.

What the judgment does tell us is substantial enough.

Recorder Singer KC says NHBC’s claim against Hodson Developments is for around £5 million. He summarises it as a claim under NHBC’s rules for “remediation and other costs in respect of a number of developments”. Alternatively, NHBC relies on an indemnity agreement which it says was entered into by the second and third defendants.

Those are NHBC’s claims.

They aren’t findings that Hodson Developments owes NHBC £5 million, that defects existed at every development in issue, or that either individual defendant is personally liable. The September 2025 judgment wasn’t the trial of those allegations at all. It concerned something much narrower: whether Hodson Developments should escape a procedural sanction after missing the deadline for its costs budget.

But the judgment leaves one whopping hole in the public picture:

Which developments?

We’ve searched the publicly accessible court material for the underlying Particulars of Claim or a schedule identifying them and haven’t found either. The published judgment doesn’t name a single one. That means we presently cannot responsibly connect the £5 million claim to Chobham Lakes, Crispin House, The Orchard, Chilmington Green or any other Hodson development merely because those names appear elsewhere in the company’s history.

Then Hodson misses a court deadline

The procedural history is revealing in its own right. All three defendants initially instructed Gowlings in February 2024. By late July that year the two individual defendants had moved to North Star Law because of what the judgment says was a conflict, although Recorder Singer records that the nature of that conflict wasn’t explained to him. Pleadings finally closed in June 2025.

Meanwhile, another planning inquiry was taking up time. Evidence presented on behalf of Hodson Developments said a planning inquiry beginning in February 2025, and later adjourned into April and May, had effectively occupied all of Mr Hodson’s and the company’s time. Recorder Singer noted, however, that the failure to give proper instructions to Gowlings appeared to pre-date those months.

On 3 March 2025, Gowlings warned Hodson Developments that it intended to terminate its retainer and warned of the consequences of failing to file a costs budget in time. The firm terminated the retainer on 14 May and gave another warning. On 23 May it applied formally to cease acting; Mr Justice Waksman made that order on 3 June.

The costs-budget deadline had been 30 May.

All three defendants missed it. The individual defendants were only one day late and obtained uncontested relief. Hodson Developments was in a different position: a combined budget wasn’t before the court until 19 June, roughly three weeks after the deadline. The estimated future element that would have been subject to costs management was approximately £260,000.

Recorder Singer found the breach serious, found no good reason for it and refused relief. Under CPR 3.14, the consequence is that Hodson Developments is treated as having filed a budget consisting only of applicable court fees for its future costs. The judge expressly recorded that the sanction is forward-looking, so it doesn’t automatically prevent recovery of costs already incurred. TMC Legal’s analysis of the case reaches the same point: being an unrepresented limited company didn’t remove the obligation to meet the budgeting deadline.

That could matter considerably if Hodson ultimately succeeds in defending NHBC’s substantive claim. Winning a case doesn’t automatically mean recovering every pound spent fighting it, and the sanction substantially restricts what Hodson Developments could recover for future costs. It doesn’t make NHBC’s underlying allegations true; it changes the costs position surrounding the defence of them.

The judge’s criticism went further than mere diary management. He concluded that the explanation was consistent with a party not taking its obligations to comply with court orders seriously, nor “taking this litigation terribly seriously”. Relief was refused and the CPR 3.14 sanction remained.

And then the timing becomes difficult to ignore.

Two court processes begin to converge

Hodson Developments applied for relief from the costs sanction on 4 July 2025.

Four days later, on 8 July, HM Revenue and Customs presented a petition in the Companies Court to wind up Hodson Developments Ltd, stating that it was a creditor of the company. The scale of that debt became clear in the statement of affairs lodged at Companies House: Hodson Developments owed HMRC £678,238.46 as a secondary preferential creditor for PAYE, VAT and National Insurance contributions, plus a further £263,742.14 as an unsecured non-preferential claim.

Taken together, the company owed HMRC £941,980.60. That precise figure also appears against HM Revenue & Customs in the company’s detailed creditor schedule.

The September judgment refusing relief therefore landed against a very different corporate backdrop from the one in which NHBC had started proceedings in January 2024.

On 27 October 2025, Thomas Hodson ceased to be a director of Hodson Developments. Then, on 17 November 2025, the company resolved to wind itself up voluntarily. Martyn James Pullin and Simon Baggs of FRP Advisory were appointed joint liquidators in a creditors’ voluntary liquidation. Alan Derek Hodson chaired the meeting.

The NHBC case didn’t simply vanish from the public court record. HMCTS-derived listing data subsequently showed HT-2024-000019 listed for an application hearing at the Rolls Building on 19 June 2026. Our searches as at 1 September 2026 have found no later published judgment determining the merits of NHBC’s underlying £5 million claim.

That leaves Part Two in a rather different place from where it began.

At The Orchard, one house was set out in the wrong position and Hodson successfully recovered £115,457 from the engineers. At Crispin House, planning enforcement issues were ultimately resolved. At Chobham Lakes, however, Hodson lost a misrepresentation case built around persistent heating problems and a dispute which the courts found should have been disclosed to a purchaser. NHBC was already involved there through its guarantee. Years later, NHBC commenced a new and much larger claim seeking around £5 million from Hodson Developments concerning remediation and other costs across several unidentified developments.

We know the amount.

We know the claimant.

We know the company being sued.

What the published judgment still doesn’t tell us is perhaps the most important thing of all: which developments generated the claim, what NHBC says went wrong at each one, and how the £5 million is calculated. Until the pleadings emerge, those questions remain unanswered.

But while that litigation was unfolding, Hodson Developments itself was heading into liquidation — and companies connected with its largest project were heading towards administration.

In Part Three: the HMRC winding-up petition, the liquidation of Hodson Developments Limited, the administration of Hodson Developments (Ashford) and associated Chilmington Green companies, and the cluster of land and property litigation involving Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime