Part 3: Hodson’s Chilmington Green Collapse — £211.9m in Creditor Claims, Six Administrations and 5,750 Homes at Stake

Chilmington Green was supposed to be much more than a housing estate. Ashford planned for a new community of up to 5,750 homes, schools, shops, parks and roads, backed by roughly £125 million towards local amenities. Years later, Alan Hodson (pictured) and his companies were trying to remove or reduce planning obligations worth around £99 million, rising to £104 million in its final viability case. The Planning Inspector largely said no. Fifty-seven days later, five Hodson companies were in administration. A sixth followed in June. The insolvency papers now reveal about £211.9 million of identifiable creditor demands and balances across separate Hodson company estates — and potentially considerably more.

On 20 January 2026, Planning Inspector Grahame Kean delivered a decision running to 61 pages on Chilmington Green. Before him were 122 requests by five Hodson companies to change or remove parts of the legal agreement governing one of the biggest housing developments in Kent.

Only five were allowed. Eleven had been withdrawn.

The other 106 were dismissed.

Fifty-seven days later, on 18 March, Hodson Developments (Ashford) Ltd and four associated Chilmington companies entered administration. Grant Thornton was called in. Then, on 25 June, Hodson Developments (CG Three) Ltd — one of the companies which had fought the planning appeal — went into a separate administration under RSM.

The timing is striking. But it doesn’t prove that losing the planning appeal caused the companies to fail, and we’re not going to pretend it does.

What it does show is where two stories finally collided: the planning of a new town and the financing of the businesses expected to help build it.

To understand that, we need to go back to what Chilmington Green was supposed to be.

The bargain behind 5,750 homes

Ashford Borough Council adopted the Chilmington Green Area Action Plan in July 2013. This wasn’t a plan for a few hundred homes around an existing village. It envisaged a major extension of Ashford containing up to 5,750 homes and 1,000 jobs, delivered over roughly 25 years, with transport, schools, community facilities and green infrastructure growing alongside it.

Outline planning permission, reference 12/00400/AS, followed on 6 January 2017. It allowed up to 5,750 homes, business and retail space, a secondary school, as many as four primary schools, community and leisure buildings, open space, roads, footpaths, cycle routes and three accesses onto the A28.

But permission came with a deal.

On 27 February 2017, the developers entered into a huge 433 page Section 106 agreement with Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council. Strip away the planning language and a Section 106 agreement is basically this: you’re being allowed to build thousands of homes, but those homes create demands on roads, schools and public services, so certain things must be provided or paid for as the development grows.

Some obligations required money. Others required land, buildings or works. Some stopped more houses being occupied until an agreed piece of infrastructure or financial security was in place. The agreement was later varied in 2019 and again in 2022.

Ashford still describes the package as providing around £125 million towards local amenities, including schools, shops, healthcare, sports and leisure facilities and substantial areas of public open space. Crucially, that didn’t mean Hodson had to hand the councils a £125 million cheque on day one. The obligations were phased and triggered as Chilmington grew.

That distinction becomes very important later.

Chilmington was also baked into Ashford’s wider housing plans. During preparation of the Local Plan 2030, the council expected the development to produce 2,500 homes by 2030 In 2017, ABC described that figure as “realistic and conservative”.

So this wasn’t merely a private developer with a large piece of land. Chilmington had become part of the machinery Ashford was relying upon to meet its future housing needs.

And then the machinery began to jam.

The fight to rewrite the deal

The row over the Section 106 agreement didn’t suddenly appear when the businesses collapsed.

On 20 August 2020, Hodson asked ABC and KCC to modify or discharge 55 provisions. The councils refused most of them, leaving eight for further consideration. Hodson went to the High Court seeking judicial review. That case was ultimately settled by consent in April 2021.

Hodson tried again.

A fresh application followed in April 2021. The councils’ November decision agreed six requests completely and five partly but rejected the other 46, although they proposed alternatives in some cases. Hodson again sought judicial review. Permission was refused, first on paper and then after an oral hearing.

There were further applications in 2022. On 20 October that year came the application which eventually led to the Planning Inspectorate inquiry. By October 2023, with no determination within the relevant period, Hodson had appealed.

By now the argument was far bigger than whether a payment date ought to move a few months.

Hodson’s case was that changed circumstances, delays and the financial burden of the obligations had damaged the viability and deliverability of Chilmington. ABC and KCC’s position was that many of those obligations remained necessary precisely because thousands more homes were still intended to be built.

And the money involved was enormous.

ABC’s closing submissions to the Inspector said Hodson had originally contended that it needed about £99 million of savings for the development to progress. By the final viability appraisal, ABC said that figure had risen to £104 million. Those were ABC’s characterisations of Hodson’s viability case, rather than findings by the Inspector about a debt owed to the councils.

That needs spelling out.

Hodson didn’t owe ABC and KCC an overdue £99 million bill.

The figure represented the approximate value of obligations and costs Hodson wanted removed, reduced or altered. Some were future payments. Some concerned infrastructure. Some were financial security designed to protect the public purse if a developer failed later.

But by 2025, this wasn’t just an argument about future costs either. Some bills had already fallen due.

By 2025, real money was being chased

On 6 March 2025, KCC issued a High Court claim against six Hodson companies over payments connected with Chilmington Green’s first primary school.

KCC said £639,136.20 of contribution indexation was overdue, together with £172,207.24 of interest. Total claimed: £811,343.44. That remains a claim, not a judgment, so it shouldn’t be described as finally proved debt.

Road money was an even bigger problem.

The agreement surrounding improvements to the A28 contained a schedule totalling £28,988,800, spread over instalments originally running from 2021 to 2030. The development was also subject to a requirement for an on-demand bond of the same amount. The bond was essentially financial security: if the developer defaulted, KCC wasn’t supposed to be left holding the baby — or, more accurately, the roadworks bill.

By February 2025, KCC was demanding £13,360,800 in what it said were outstanding A28 post-contract instalments. In April it went further, threatening legal action to prevent more than 400 homes being occupied until the required bond was provided.

That 400-home threshold became one of the most important battlegrounds in the entire appeal.

Hodson wanted the £28,988,800 bond requirement removed. Its evidence was that the type of on-demand bond required was no longer obtainable unless an equivalent amount of cash was lodged as security. The Inspector wasn’t persuaded that this justified stripping the protection away.

He explained the arrangement in unusually plain terms. KCC was expected to procure and forward-fund the A28 works; the developer paid the agreed costs; and the bond protected KCC if the developer failed. Without that security, the risk could move from the developer to the council and, ultimately, the public purse.

His conclusion was blunt in substance: removing the bond could allow housing to continue without the infrastructure required to make the development acceptable, while transferring the risk of developer default to KCC and the public.

So Request 91 — removing the £28,988,800 bond — was dismissed.

So was Request 93, which sought to remove obligations to pay the A28 pre-contract and post-contract costs and shortfalls.

The Inspector says no

The public inquiry ran over nine sitting days between February and May 2025. The Inspector also visited the site twice.

For anybody without a planning-law qualification, the central question was actually quite simple.

The Inspector wasn’t deciding whether Chilmington Green should have planning permission all over again. Nor was he being asked to decide whether Hodson was making enough money.

For each obligation he essentially had to ask: does this promise still do something useful? If it does, would Hodson’s proposed replacement do that job just as well?

That distinction proved fatal to much of Hodson’s case.

The Inspector accepted that financial viability could be relevant in some circumstances, but rejected the idea that it trumped everything else. An obligation designed to stop development going beyond a certain point until necessary infrastructure was secured could still have a useful purpose even if complying with it made progressing the scheme financially difficult.

That explains why the decision wasn’t simply about roads.

Requests concerning affordable housing were dismissed. So were proposals involving community facilities, play spaces, allotments, Discovery Park, education, ecology, buses, traffic monitoring, the Regional Infrastructure Fund, public art, archaeology, monitoring fees, bank accounts and viability reviews.

Out of the 122 requests, only five succeeded. Eleven had been withdrawn.

One hundred and six were dismissed.

The decision came on 20 January 2026.

Then came 18 March.

Fifty-seven days later

Grant Thornton’s account of what happened next is important because it stops us drawing a neat but unjustified line saying: Hodson lost the appeal, therefore Hodson collapsed.

The administrators say the five companies entered administration largely because of cash-flow pressures created by the stalled development. Section 106 payments had to be funded ahead of, or alongside, completions, squeezing working capital. Meanwhile, debt secured against the land continued to accrue servicing costs. Eventually, the companies couldn’t meet their obligations as they fell due.

There was another problem: nutrient neutrality. Waste-water restrictions had also held back development, and although permission had been obtained for a treatment plant, Grant Thornton said an Environment Agency permit had not yet been issued. The administrators identified that alongside the Section 106 problems as one of the two headline obstacles to further development.

So there wasn’t one smoking gun.

There was a stalled development, planning obligations, infrastructure bills, continuing finance costs and a lender which had identified defaults.

Then we get to the figure that changes the scale of the story.

£179 million.

Before Grant Thornton was appointed, the secured creditor, acting through security agent Solutus Advisors Ltd, demanded a balance of approximately £179 million. Each of the five companies in the March administration had jointly and severally guaranteed that liability. In everyday language, the creditor could look to the guarantor companies for the same underlying debt. It does not mean five lots of £179 million.

Grant Thornton expected the secured lender itself to suffer a shortfall.

The £179 million claim still has to be proved through the insolvency process.

There is a particularly striking comparison with Hodson Developments (Ashford) Ltd’s own accounts, filed just weeks before administration. At 31 December 2025 they showed £116,512,569 of stock, £62,691,953 of debtors, £750 cash and £29,612 of fixed assets: £179,234,884 of gross assets. Against that were liabilities totalling £182,870,122, leaving net liabilities of £3,635,238.

So there are two different £179 million figures here.

One is roughly £179.2 million of assets recorded in one company’s accounts.

The other is the approximately £179 million subsequently demanded by the secured creditor across five jointly liable companies.

They shouldn’t be confused.

Nor should accounting values be mistaken for what land and other assets will actually fetch in an insolvency. Grant Thornton was commissioning fresh land valuations and said it expected the secured creditor to come up short.

And the administrators still didn’t have the whole picture.

They had formally asked the directors for statements of affairs and important financial information. In their May proposals they said these hadn’t been supplied despite repeated requests, leaving them with only a limited understanding of the companies’ complete assets and liabilities.

Meanwhile, a small number of creditors had contacted Grant Thornton indicating another £34.5 million of potential claims. No final creditor-by-creditor schedule had yet been established, and between roughly £24.4 million and £34.4 million of those potential claims appeared to involve connected parties.

And that still wasn’t the end of it.

Then CG Three fell

Hodson Developments (CG Three) Ltd hadn’t been one of the five companies placed into Grant Thornton’s administration in March.

It had, however, been one of the five Hodson companies pursuing the Section 106 appeal.

CG Three controlled Chilmington Lakes phases 2b and 2c. RSM says those phases comprised 122 homes: 58 had been sold and 64 remained, 48 of them being rented on short-term agreements.

Its lender was Zorin Avenue Lend Co 1 DAC.

By the time RSM was appointed on 25 June 2026, Zorin was owed £31,283,757. Another £335,064 was listed as unsecured creditor debt. RSM said there weren’t enough assets to repay Zorin in full and expected no return for unsecured creditors.

Among those unsecured debts was £315,124 in council tax owed to Ashford Borough Council.

RSM also discovered something unusual about the way CG Three had operated. Although 48 properties were being rented, the company apparently didn’t operate its own bank account; the administrators understood that rental receipts had instead been paid to one of the connected companies.

RSM knew of additional creditors not included in the directors’ statement of affairs, too. And an unresolved dispute with Pentland concerned land containing amenity infrastructure which CG Three had contracted to purchase. Its lawyers advised that, because of the insolvency, the company couldn’t pay the outstanding balance of the purchase price. The report doesn’t tell us what that balance was, so we can’t add it to any total.

So how much do the Hodson companies owe?

This is where it would be very easy to produce a whopping great number — and get it wrong.

The figure we can presently defend is about £211.9 million of identifiable creditor demands and balances across separate insolvency estates.

That consists of approximately £179 million demanded by the secured creditor across the five Grant Thornton companies; £31,283,757 secured and £335,064 unsecured at CG Three; and £1,245,137.16 of creditors in the liquidation of the original Hodson Developments Ltd.

The last of those is another important strand of this story.

HMRC had presented a winding-up petition against the original Hodson Developments Ltd in July 2025. Alan Hodson’s subsequent statement of affairs, signed in November, showed no assets available to creditors and total claims of £1,245,137.16. HMRC alone was listed at £941,980.60 — £678,238.46 for PAYE, VAT and National Insurance with preferential status, plus another £263,742.14 unsecured claim.

The £211.9 million figure isn’t a final court-determined “Hodson group debt”. The biggest component, £179 million, is rounded and has yet to be formally proved. These are also different companies and separate insolvency estates.

But it is the strongest figure the documents currently support.

Will the eventual number be higher? Yes.

If Grant Thornton’s additional £34.5 million of reported potential unsecured claims are all proved, are genuinely additional and don’t duplicate anything already counted, the paper exposure would rise to about £246.4 million.

There are larger numbers we could pile on top of that too.

But we’re not doing that.

KCC’s £811,343.44 primary-school court claim remains a claim. The £13.36 million A28 demand may ultimately overlap with creditor claims in the administrations. The £28.988 million A28 bond is security, not simply another overdue debt. NHBC has separate litigation against the original Hodson company concerning a claim of around £5 million. Pentland’s balance remains undisclosed. Other Section 106 obligations may fall due in the future.

Adding every one of them would certainly make a bigger headline.

It wouldn’t necessarily make a true one.

What happens to the town now?

For residents, creditors’ schedules and floating charges aren’t really the biggest question.

The town is.

Remember where this began. Ashford planned on Chilmington producing 2,500 homes by 2030. Its Area Action Plan envisaged an eventual community of as many as 5,750 homes. The council still describes around £125 million of local amenities accompanying that growth.

Now look at Ashford’s latest five-year housing supply calculation.

As at April 2026, ABC recorded 97 Chilmington completions in 2022/23, 45 the following year, 288 in 2024/25 and 34 in 2025/26. But because of uncertainty surrounding delivery by the lead developer, the council has taken the remarkable step of including no Chilmington Green dwellings at all in its housing supply calculation for 2026–31.

That doesn’t mean no more houses will ever be built at Chilmington. There are other developers on the wider site and both the primary and secondary schools are already open. ABC and KCC say they are taking legal advice on what the Hodson administrations mean for the Section 106 obligations and existing legal action, and insist they will continue trying to secure delivery of those commitments.

But the contrast is difficult to miss.

A development once expected to provide 2,500 homes by 2030 is currently contributing zero homes to the council’s five-year supply calculation.

And on 2 September 2026, Ashford opened the first consultation on an entirely new Local Plan 2043 — the document that will decide where the borough expects its next generation of homes, jobs and infrastructure to come from.

That makes what happens at Chilmington more than the ending of a business story.

Part One of this series followed Alan Hodson and his companies from the development business they built around Ascot and Sunningdale. Part Two followed the warning signs, disputes and litigation that accumulated around the businesses.

Part Three ends in a different place altogether.

There is a planning permission for up to 5,750 homes. There is a Section 106 bargain intended to put schools, roads, buses, parks and other infrastructure around them. There was an attempt to remove or reduce obligations worth roughly £99 million — later put by ABC at £104 million in Hodson’s final viability appraisal. The Planning Inspector largely refused.

Fifty-seven days later, five companies were in administration.

A sixth followed.

The documented creditor exposure now runs to about £211.9 million, before potential additional claims are resolved.

But Chilmington Green is still there.

The houses already built are real. The families living in them are real. So are the roads, schools and community facilities that were supposed to arrive alongside thousands more homes.

The question now isn’t simply how much the Hodson companies owe. It is who finishes the town — and who pays for the promises that were meant to come with it.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime