Flats out: nearly four years after the blocks built on the site of the Lion Green Road car park in Coulsdon were completed, Tory Mayor Perry’s council is nursing a £20m hole in its accounts from a property deal gone badly wrong

It is almost three years since this website warned that a ‘complicated, opaque lease-back arrangement’ conducted with a property firm with no real track record, for the disposal of blocks of flats at Red Clover Gardens, all looked just a bit iffy.
Guess what happened next…?
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

In the week that the council needed a £119million bail-out to balance its latest budget, Inside Croydon has uncovered a £20million hole in the council’s finances, caused by the collapse of a property deal over one of Brick by Brick’s final developments.

Three years ago, Conservative Mayor Jason Perry pushed through a dodgy-looking sale and lease-back deal for three of the five “architect-designed” blocks of flats at Red Clover Gardens, built on the Lion Green Road car park in Coulsdon.

Taken together, the 157 flats were reckoned to have a market value approaching £50million. Mayor Perry’s crack negotiators at the council only managed to get a sale price of £38million, in a convoluted deal with Regen Capital, a little-known company that some suggested did not have the financial clout to undertake such a deal.

In the red: small businessman Jason Perry has overseen a failed property deal in Coulsdon

Red Clover Gardens had been built in typical Brick by Brick style: high-spec and even higher build costs.

There had been delays with the site, problems with the build quality, and then covid, and Red Clover Gardens was only completed in 2022 – by which time the council was well on its way to its third Section 114 notice of effective bankruptcy.

So any income from any of the assets from the cursed Brick by Brick misadventure would have been very welcome at the crisis-hit council.

But the flats remained empty, as the council pondered how to make best use of 157 new homes in the middle of a housing crisis. Coulsdon residents became suspicious about what the Town Hall might have in mind for the town centre site.

By the end of 2023, one of Perry’s trusted aides, Ian Parker, the Coulsdon Town councillor and full-time local Tory organiser, was telling locals that all the money was secured for the sale of Red Clover Gardens and the deal couldn’t possibly go wrong.

But that was never really true.

All five blocks and 157 flats were sold to Regen for a bargain basement £38million.

The plan was that Regen would sell or lease 72 flats in two of the blocks on the private housing market (one-bedroom “apartments” are being rented out for £1,500 per month).

The council would then lease back three of the blocks (85 flats) to be used for affordable housing for 50 years. The council leased those three blocks to another company, Mears, as a Registered Provider of housing, in a 10-year arrangement to manage the properties. The council would nominate the tenants from its housing waiting list.

Fast forward 18 months, to March 2025, when Regen Coulsdon – the private company established to handle the Red Clover Gardens property deal – failed to pay the council the outstanding balance – £20million. Croydon Council was being stiffed.

Housing crisis: one-bed flats in Red Clover Gardens in Coulsdon are rented out at £1,500 per month

In July last year, Huw Rhys Lewis BSc, BArch, MSc, MRIBA, MAPM, MRICS, the council’s interim director of commercial investment and capital abruptly quit his £1,000 per day job. The reasons for his departure are not known, but it could not have helped in the council’s efforts to keep on top of their crumbling property deal.

In November last year, a “back-stop” payment date came and went, and still no money was received by the council from Regen.

According to Companies House records, at the end of November 2025, Ben Pearce, one of three directors of Regen Capital and Regen Coulsdon, resigned from both companies.

In what must have been among the final acts as Croydon’s finance director of Jane West, on December 1 the council issued a default notice to Regen Coulsdon for a payment of £20million, which was overdue under the deferred capital arrangement that had been agreed in May 2024.

Perry and his senior council officials have been trying to cover-up the £20million hole in their accounts ever since.

On December 19, West was putting her name to a formal council order that would prevent the matter of the missing £20million payment being brought before the all-party scrutiny committee. The excuse given: being stiffed for £20million was an urgent matter…

Formal notice: the council papers from December which blocked the £20m property deal collapse being discussed at the scrutiny committee

“The council needs to act quickly to secure its position in relation to assets worth c£20million,” the gagging notice said.

“The council holds a charge over the assets and must take action to ensure the transaction completes by end of March 202[6].”

Labour councillor Leila Ben-Hassel, the chair of the scrutiny committee, apparently agreed to waive any possible call-in to discuss this important matter of public interest.

As ever, the council used commercial confidentiality as its excuse for hiding the matter of the missing £20million of public money from the public.

“It was considered that early publication could have limited the council’s ability to manage the matter effectively, particularly where commercial considerations were still being developed,” a council report says.

“Deferring inclusion…”, meaning bringing this fetid matter into proper council scrutiny, “… helped ensure that the council could consider its options carefully and protect its position while work was ongoing.”

Published details: the ‘special urgency’ paper, issued on Dec 19, under authority of the council’s Monitoring Officer, Stephen Lawrence-Orumwense, which includes the ‘c£20m’ value of the property deal. The council’s chief legal official also managed to get the date wrong for the completion of the transaction (March 2025 should be March 2026)

In the past week, two charges have been applied to Regen Coulsdon’s Companies House records, formally transferring ownership of three of the blocks at Red Clover Gardens back into council ownership. From a deal which was supposed to generate £38million, our cash-strapped council has only received £16million, but it has repossessed three of the blocks.

The matter was (almost) raised at Wednesday night’s council budget meeting, though senior councillors tip-toed around the £20million hole in the accounts and never mentioned the figure – apparently thinking that it was still “secret”, even though the council had published the figure in December.

When the first payment deadline came and went in March last year, “Alarm bells didn’t ring,” according to Stuart King, the leader of the Labour group at the Town Hall.

“Oh yes alarm bells did ring,” countered Jason Cummings, Mayor Perry’s cabinet member for finance with a £20million hole in the accounts.

‘Fully appraised’: Perry’s cabinet member for finance, and the collapsed property deal, Jason Cummings

“I was kept fully appraised,” Cummings said. “They…”, meaning Regen, “… were unable to secure the funding.” Which was what Cummings and his crack deal-makers in Fisher’s Folly were told would happen three years ago.

So it turns out that Mayor Jason Perry and his council are no better at making money from the usually lucrative London property market than Tony Newman and Jo Negrini were. 

Lawyers had been engaged to secure the council’s assets, Cummings said, and getting the properties back might now be used to the council’s advantage. It was impossible to see whether the Conservative councillor had his fingers crossed as he said this.

Whether the council can ever recover the unpaid £20million, or anything close to the property’s true market value, Cummings didn’t say.

“Values of assets have changed,” Cummings said, hinting that Regen wanted to reduce their purchase price. There has, Cummings said, been “a change in disposal strategy”.

By some calculations, Regen Capital, the Essex-based property firm with no track record for handling medium-sized property deals and no appearance of having the finances to deliver even a cut-price £38million purchase, looks to have walked away from its negotiations with cash-strapped Croydon Council with at least £4million of what used to be public money.

By the time of this article’s publication, neither Mayor Perry’s Conservatives nor the opposition Labour group at the Town Hall had called for any kind of urgent, third-party investigation by the police or HMRC into the council’s latest financial scandal.

• The curse of Brick by Brick strikes again: read how Mayor Perry agreed a £½m hush money payment to Regen 

Read more: Perry’s ‘sale’ of Coulsdon flats will cost Croydon £60million!
Read more: Brick by Brick’s final flats put up for rent at £2,400 per month
Read more: Coulsdon flats deal was rushed through as massive tax dodge
Read more: BxB’s collapse was predictable. Why did no one else notice?
Read more: Building towards the council’s financial ruin, Brick by Brick

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