Shropshire Council has a wholly owned housing company called Cornovii Developments Ltd.

You may remember the promise. Build homes. Generate income. Act commercially. Deliver value. Produce a return for the Council. Very glossy. Very confident. Very ‘leave this to the experts, citizens, we have a spreadsheet’.

Then the numbers started behaving badly.

In 2019, the legal advice presented to Shropshire Council referred to an ambition to build 3,000 properties over an initial five-year development programme.

Three thousand.

The latest figure now appears to be 532.

That is not a revision. That is a collapse with headed paper.

From 3,000 homes to 532 homes is a fall of 2,468 homes. The latest figure is about 17.7% of the original ambition. More than 82% of the original scale has disappeared, presumably while everyone was very busy approving minutes, excluding the public, and admiring the governance framework.

This is negative growth on steroids. Just not in the direction intended, promised or quietly hoped for.

The Council Tax backdrop

This would be serious at any time. It is far worse now.

Shropshire citizens have just been hit with an 8.99% Council Tax rise, approved after special government permission because the Council’s finances were in such a precarious state that the alternative was apparently even worse.

So while citizens are being asked to pay more, they are entitled to ask whether Shropshire Council can explain what happened to a council-owned company that began life with a 3,000-home ambition and is now being discussed at 532 homes.

That is not nit-picking. That is the basic public question of capability.

The quarter-million starter pack

The February 2019 Council papers said the proposed company required an initial revenue budget of £250,000 to cover directors’ costs, management and administration costs, and professional fees to establish the proposals, site and financial appraisals, and development master-planning work.

A quarter of a million pounds to help set up the machinery before the machinery had delivered anything. Civic enterprise, apparently. Add professional advice, apply optimism, wait for homes to fall out.

The same papers refer repeatedly to legal advice from Trowers & Hamlins and Savills. What I have not yet found in the public supplier-payment search is a clean, obvious line showing the specific legal fee for the Trowers advice around this particular due diligence exercise. It may be bundled, coded elsewhere, below publication thresholds, paid in another period, or sitting under a heading only an accountant and a tired ferret could love.

That makes the next question simple: where is the invoice trail?

If the advice was good enough to help justify creating a council-owned company, the cost of that advice should also be capable of being identified. If public money paid for the confidence, the public is entitled to know the price of the confidence.

The profit problem

The 2019 business case illustrations assumed that profit before tax represented around 15% of sales, described as being at the low end of market norms. That matters because margin depends on delivery, scale, timing, cost, borrowing and overheads. Trivial matters, obviously, in the same way oxygen is a trivial matter to breathing.

A 3,000-home company is not the same as a 532-home company. The overheads do not politely shrink just because the ambition has gone missing. Professional fees, management, governance, finance, land work, appraisals, reporting, officer time and board machinery all have to be carried by the actual delivery, not the dream delivery.

So what has happened to the expected profit margin?

If the number of homes collapses, does the return collapse with it? If not, why not? What assumption has changed? What scheme mix has changed? What risk has moved? What cost has been absorbed? What has been deferred? What has been quietly re-labelled as strategy?

These are not hostile questions. They are the sort of questions anyone would ask before lending money to a commercial project. The difference is that Shropshire Council appears to have been lending public confidence as well.

The magic of almost the same return

The public summaries make the issue sharper.

In 2024, Cornovii’s public business-plan material referred to 882 homes and expected financial benefits of £38.103 million to the Council. In 2025, the public material referred to 582 homes and expected financial benefits of £36.832 million.

So the plan appears to lose 300 homes, yet the expected financial benefit falls by only about £1.27 million.

Perhaps there is a perfectly sound explanation. Tenure mix. Private rented sector assumptions. Land values. Timing. Retained assets. Revised financing. A clever model tucked away in an exempt appendix, having a little sleep.

Fine. Publish the explanation.

Because without the model, citizens are being asked to accept something very convenient: a major reduction in housing output with only a relatively small reduction in forecast financial benefit. That may be business. Or it may be arithmetic wearing a council badge.

Commercial sensitivity is not a duvet

The Housing Supervisory Board was supposed to provide oversight. Yet some of the most important financial material appears to have been handled in exempt sessions.

Commercial sensitivity can be legitimate. It can protect genuine commercial detail. It should not be used as a duvet under which weak forecasting, shifting purpose, falling delivery and awkward public-money questions are invited to curl up quietly.

The public does not need every tender line or negotiation tactic. The public does need to know whether Cornovii has delivered, whether the Council has recovered its costs, whether the business case still works, and whether councillors actually understand the risk they are supervising.

If the answer to those questions is reassuring, the Council should publish enough evidence to reassure us.

If the answer is not reassuring, that is exactly why the public needs to see it.

The pay detail hiding in the drawer

No public evidence has yet been found that Harpreet Rayet received a performance bonus. That needs saying, because accusations should not be invented just because the file already looks untidy.

But the remuneration position is still awkward.

The 2020/21 public accounts showed ‘remuneration paid to director’ of £110,586, recharged from the parent company. Later, Shropshire Council confirmed in a December 2025 response that CDL does not publish directors’ remuneration in its Companies House accounts because it is a small company and is not currently required to do so. It said directors’ salaries and related costs are included in the full accounts provided to the CDL Board and to Shropshire Council, but not in the abridged public version. It also stated that total directors’ remuneration transferred to CDL for the year ended 31 March 2025 was £63,206.

So, no proven bonus.

But a very obvious transparency problem.

A council-owned company. Shrinking delivery. Public exposure. Pay detail in full accounts but not in the public version. Citizens being asked to swallow the biggest Council Tax rise in Shropshire Council’s history. What a splendid little arrangement. All the accountability of a locked filing cabinet, but with a shareholder structure.

The Council should now confirm whether any performance-related payment, bonus, additional benefit, retention payment, exceptional payment or non-salary remuneration has ever been paid to Harpreet Rayet, any CDL director or any senior CDL officer, and if so by whom, when, on what basis, and against what performance criteria.

And now Shirehall?

The possibility that Cornovii might be connected in any way with the future of Shirehall should now trigger an immediate pause.

Before Shropshire Council places another major public asset anywhere near this company, it should first publish a proper performance account: promised homes, completed homes, loans, spend, recoveries, forecast returns and actual returns.

If it cannot answer those questions clearly, Cornovii should not be treated as a delivery vehicle for Shirehall. It should be treated as a risk requiring explanation.

Publish the paper trail

Shropshire Council should now publish the full Cornovii paper trail from inception to the present day: the business plans, revised forecasts, loan arrangements, drawdowns, shareholder reports, cost-recovery records, expected returns, actual returns and the explanation for every major reduction in housing numbers.

If material genuinely needs redaction, redact it. But do not hide the story behind the word ‘commercial’ as if citizens are too delicate to cope with numbers.

The original ambition was 3,000 homes.

The latest figure appears to be 532.

That is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental collapse in scale, and it raises serious questions about the competence of those who promoted, approved, supervised and continued to defend the project.

This matters because Shropshire Council has just imposed an 8.99% Council Tax increase on citizens while attempting to stabilise its own finances. At the same time, one of its own wholly owned companies appears to have moved from a major commercial housing ambition to a greatly reduced programme, with key business plans and financial assumptions still largely hidden from public view.

So the issue is no longer confined to Cornovii.

It is now a direct question about Shropshire Council’s capability: its ability to forecast, scrutinise risk, protect public money, supervise council-owned companies and give citizens a full and honest account of what has happened.

A council that asks the public to pay more must be able to demonstrate that it can manage what it already controls.

On Cornovii, that demonstration is now overdue.