Cornovii: Building Success? Or Just Building Debt?

Cornovii: The Council That Built a Company, Hid the Books, and Lost the Architects

Since 2020, Shropshire Council’s Housing Supervisory Board has met more than a dozen times to discuss Cornovii. Each meeting began with the same ritual: “That the press and public be excluded.” Now the doors are still closed, the loans still rising, and the two men who built the scheme — Mark Barrow and Andy Begley — have quietly left the building.

Cornovii was supposed to be the bold new future of Shropshire housing: a slick, “arm’s-length” development company, funded by the council but operating “commercially.” The idea was simple — or at least it looked simple enough in PowerPoint. The Council would lend Cornovii millions, Cornovii would build homes, sell them at profit, and pay the council back. Everyone would win. Except, of course, the public, who were never invited to see the terms, the risks, or the growing pile of loan paperwork.

The company’s political midwives were Cllr Robert Macey, Portfolio Holder for Housing and Strategic Planning, and Cllr Dean Carroll, Cabinet Member for Housing and Assets — ably assisted by Cllr Vince Hunt (Chair of the Housing Supervisory Board), Cllr Heather Kidd (the token opposition voice who somehow forgot to oppose), and Cllr Lezley Picton, the Leader who nodded it through with the confidence of someone who wouldn’t have to explain it later — and didn’t have a clue anyway.

Behind them, the council’s own holy trinity of housing — Mark Barrow (Director of Place), James Walton (Section 151 Officer and keeper of the public purse), and Harpreet Rayet (a man with more titles than houses) — kept the machinery running. Rayet wasn’t just running Cornovii Developments; he was also CEO of STAR Housing and a director of Cornovii Investments (Shropshire) Ltd. In short, he was developer, landlord, and regulator all at once. If there’s a modern definition of “conflict of interest,” you could build an estate on it and call it Transparency View.

By late 2024, both Barrow and Begley had exited stage left — Barrow suddenly on 6 December 2024, Begley quietly in 2025. Their departure statements spoke of “new opportunities” and “exciting challenges ahead,” which usually translates in council speak as “I’m getting out while the lights are still on.”

What they left behind was a tangle of companies — Cornovii Developments Ltd, Cornovii Investments (Shropshire) Ltd, and Shropshire Towns and Rural Housing Ltd (STAR) — all merrily cross-directed, cross-funded and cross-examined by no one. Each reported to the same handful of people, borrowed from the same public purse, and signed off its own assurances of oversight. In other words: the perfect circle of accountability — with no beginning and no end.

And now, with poetic timing, the board of STAR Housing includes Cllr Duncan Kerr (the only Green in the village) and Cllr James Owen (the peoples FOI champion) — both sitting councillors, both supposedly holding the executive to account, and both directors of the very company they’re meant to scrutinise. In Shropshire’s housing ecosystem, conflict of interest isn’t a risk — it’s a recruitment policy.

The boardroom of Cornovii itself reads like a roll-call of polite obscurity:
• Harpreet Rayet, Managing Director — architect of the grand plan and now the bridge between every subsidiary.
• Richard Cambray, Rosamund Bridges, and Tim Pritchard, non-executive directors — “independent” in the same way a council audit is independent.
• And from the mothership, James Walton, keeping a weather eye on the accounts he himself signed off.

The Cornovii Investments board added the same names with fewer distinctions, while STAR Housing’s board welcomed Cllr Dean Carroll and Cllr Vince Hunt — turning oversight into overlap. Between them, they managed to turn the idea of arm’s-length governance into a three-handed handshake. And now they have departed to pastures new and have been replaced by Harpreet Rayet, Richard Cambray, Christopher Poulton, Timothy Pritchard and Rosamund Bridges.

Meanwhile, the Housing Supervisory Board — a kind of cross between a parish council and a Masonic lodge — dutifully excluded the public at every meeting where Cornovii was mentioned. The published minutes list cheerful promises of “delivery targets” and “affordable homes,” while the actual numbers, loans, and losses are tucked away in exempt appendices “for commercial reasons.” In other words: your money, their secret.

And yet, for all that secrecy, the outcomes are plain enough.
The Council’s loan exposure has ballooned into the tens of millions; Cornovii’s sales projections have been “restated” (the polite word for wrong); and the promised transparency has dissolved faster than a Section 114 warning.

When the FOI requests started — five of them, each asking what the public had already paid for — the response was as predictable as it was pitiful: silence, delay, or a cut-and-paste refusal citing “commercial sensitivity.” In practice, that phrase has become Shropshire Council’s version of the Official Secrets Act — invoked whenever a question becomes awkward, a number too large, or a director too well-connected.

So here we are: the councillors still pretending, the officers still stonewalling, and the directors still drawing salaries from a company that exists largely behind closed doors. As a model of how not to mix politics and property, it’s magnificent. As an example of public accountability, it’s extinct.

As Cllr James Owen once said when asked about delays in FOI replies: “We take transparency very seriously — it just takes time.”

Why do I get the uneasy feeling of déjà vu — and the ghost of IP&E shuffling back into the room?