Yesterday, we issued a legal ultimatum to the Lichfield District Council (LDC) Planning Committee over the blatant corporate conflicts of interest regarding Bloor Homes and Coulter Lane. Now the wider district is thinking about a £5.56 million cost surge at the council’s flagship cinema development in Lichfield.

To the casual observer, an overpriced boutique cinema shell and a compromised Green Belt housing development in Burntwood look like completely different problems.

They aren’t. They are the exact same disease: A council obsessed with playing corporate businessman, running opaque private side-hustles, and completely erasing the lines of democratic accountability.

1. The Same Skeletal Crew, Different Bad Deals

The council loves to hide behind confusing corporate acronyms like LWMTS (running the planning and events capacity) and Darwin Prospects LLP (the joint venture behind the cinema). They tell the public these entities are totally separate.

But if you look at the top of the chain, the “Chinese walls” instantly vanish:

• The exact same small handful of senior council executives and senior politicians who sit on the board of LWMTS—the company cashing sponsorship cheques from developers—are the same individuals managing the council’s shareholding in the bleeding cinema project.
• They are trying to be municipal bureaucrats, private commercial landlords, event coordinators, and neutral planning judges all at the same time. The result? A collapse of rigorous oversight.

2. A Blind Spot for Basic Due Diligence

When a council stops acting like a public watchdog and starts acting like a private equity firm, things break:

• In Lichfield: They entered a complex commercial partnership to convert an old Debenhams without discovering massive, catastrophic infrastructure gaps. Now, taxpayers are on the hook for an extra £5.56 million to fix basic wiring, HVAC, and fire protection, resulting in an absurd 48-year payback period just to break even.
• In Burntwood: That same casual attitude toward commercial boundaries led them to see absolutely no issue with LWMTS soliciting sponsorship cash from Bloor Homes while a case officer using an LWM email address writes the technical planning recommendation for that exact developer (Link)

3. The Financial Domino Effect on Burntwood

Lichfield’s leadership claims the cinema blowout doesn’t affect day-to-day services. That is a financial lie.

Because of the council’s corporate structure, LWMTS and the cinema project (Darwin Prospects LLP) are legally forced to merge their balances into the council’s single “Group Accounts.” When the cinema drops a multi-million-pound financial anchor, it drains the council’s wider capital reserves.

Every penny wasted fixing a botched commercial build in Lichfield city centre is a penny that cannot be spent on the benefit of Burntwood.

The Ultimate Trap is Set

We have already served the Planning Committee with an Urgent Notice of Legal Exposure. We have proved that the technical evidence base they are using to push the Coulter Lane development is poisoned by corporate entanglement.

The cinema crisis proves that LDC’s leadership cannot be trusted to self-regulate or manage complex commercial boundaries.

If the Planning Committee ignores our warnings and rubber-stamps Bloor Homes’ development based on the advice of a compromised, council-owned company, they are handing us the final piece of evidence we need. We will see them in the High Court for a Judicial Review.

The games must stop. The Planning Committee must reject the poisoned evidence, reject the corporate overreach, and vote to REFUSE the Coulter Lane sprawl.