‘It’s gone’: How a social housing scheme left amateur investors £40m out of pocket

A social housing investment scheme that promised amateur investors huge returns with no risk has collapsed into administration owing its backers nearly £40m, City PM has learned.

Alderley Group, which invested in affordable housing projects across the North West of England, has left around 1000 investors out of pocket after claiming it could guarantee returns of up to 17 per cent a year via “socially responsible” investments.

In marketing materials and term sheets, seen by City PM, the company claimed to have partnerships with the government’s housing agency, Homes England, and said its investors faced no “planning, sales, market, or construction risk”.

“At the Alderley Group, honesty and trust are at the core of everything we do,” the group said in one brochure.

Rather than borrow from a bank, the company raised money from retail investors by selling unregulated corporate loan notes. Investors lent capital for a fixed term in return for interest, with capital due back at maturity. 

Alderley stopped paying out interest to investors in January and was hit with a winding up petition in the High Court in May, according to investors and court filings. Administrators were called in to liquidate the company in early June. Homes England also did not have a formal partnership with the company, City PM understands.

While Alderley Group said it worked to “transform lives” through affordable housing schemes for people on low incomes, its collapse has left many of its investors – some of them retirees – hundreds of thousands of pounds in the red.

Janet Moores and Andrew McManus saw nothing untoward when first looking over the marketing materials of the Alderley Group. The returns were in line with similar housing schemes they had backed in the past, and their financial adviser said the investment would be “really secure” because it was backed by the government.

Now, Moores, 62, says they are facing a very different retirement to the one they imagined.

“We feel foolish, because we’re not gamblers,” she said. 

“What was going to be a comfortable retirement is now going to be restricted. It’s like going back to when you were younger and money was scarce. We have no way of ever replacing this money, which was accumulated over 40 years of working.

“We have had to look at all our finances and reduce our spending. We normally go to the UK every two months, as my mother is 92 and housebound, but we won’t be able to do that.”

Moores and McManus, who live in Spain, purchased two loan notes – one for £70,000 in September 2024, and another for £201,000 in October 2024. Alderley in turn promised a guaranteed annual return of 15 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively.

After the 12 months was up, the company began to delay. Alderley told the couple it had triggered a clause in the small print of their contract that extended the repayment period by six months.

“Warning bells rung straight away,” said Moores, a former managing director of a pharmaceutical company.

Over the next nine months, Moores and McManus were met with obfuscation as they tried to recover their cash. But none was not forthcoming, even when the pair – who have five children between them – offered to waive the interest and settle for their original investment.

As they waited to hear from their contact at Alderley after a meeting on June 9, the company called in administrators.

“It was an awful feeling,” said Janet. “This was to be our last investment, and then we were going to spend the money on our retirement. But it’s gone, we’ve lost it, and now we can’t do it.

Moores and McManus are among hundreds of investors now lodging a claim against the company in the hope of recovering some cash. 

While the exact trigger of Alderley’s collapse is yet to be determined – the company did not respond to repeated requests for comment – its investors have turned to law firm Richardson Hartley Law to fight their case.

“One of our clients has lost £550,000 to this scheme. We have millions of pounds in claims,” Martin Richardson, senior partner at Richardson Hartley Law, which is leading the claim, told City PM.

“In the past year we have seen a number of these social housing investment projects go bust losing investors tens of millions of pounds in total.”

Richardson said the schemes are marketed widely through third party introducers and social media and sold as a tool to help solve the social housing crisis while creating guaranteed return for investors.

But, he warns, the reality of these unregulated social housing projects is very different.

“These loan note investment schemes have little or no security at all,” he said, “and thousands of people have lost their life savings.”