Woking would pay its own company £4.4m for 31 Sheerwater leases and take on the Spencer Close road, adding £275,000 a year in interest. Vote on Thursday.
Woking Borough Council is set to pay £4.441 million to buy back 31 leases on empty Sheerwater flats from its own housing company. Councillors vote on Thursday 8 October.
The deal is one of several land moves needed before the council can sell ThamesWey Housing Limited, the company that owns many of the estate’s new homes. The council’s report says the extra borrowing will cost its housing account about £275,000 a year (Executive report EXE26-119).
The Executive meets at 7pm. A special meeting of Full Council follows at 7.30pm, or when the Executive finishes, with this as its only business beyond the formalities. It needs Full Council because the sums change the capital budget set in March (Council agenda, 8 October).
What councillors are asked to approve
The report asks for these steps:
- Buy back 31 leases for £4,441,000. ThamesWey Housing bought these flats from owner-occupiers to clear land for the regeneration. They sit in empty blocks on three plots the council plans to sell to a private developer. Savills valued them.
- Take on the Copper phase road. The council would commit to building and maintaining a new access road until the highway authority adopts it.
- Move the road land out of the housing account for £1.8 million. The land is in the Housing Revenue Account, the ring-fenced account that runs council homes. Knight Frank valued it. The council’s general budget would pay for it from its capital receipts reserve.
- Finish the Yellow phase land transfer. ThamesWey has used this land since 2022 and has paid the agreed £3,029,811, but ownership has still not passed. Boundary questions and tax advice held it up.
- Delegate the rest to officers. Smaller land swaps and planning and highways agreements would be signed off without returning to councillors.
Why it is happening now
Woking issued a section 114 notice, the legal admission that it could not balance its books, on 7 June 2023. The report says it then became clear the council “could not afford” to finish the regeneration. ThamesWey was stopped from starting new phases. The original scheme was for 1,142 homes.
In June 2026 the Executive agreed to start selling ThamesWey Housing. Buyers’ checks then turned up problems, and the report says they all need fixing first.
The biggest is the road. The only vehicle access to the Copper phase runs along Spencer Close. The report says it “was not built to an adoptable standard” and was only ever meant to be temporary.
The Spencer Close road
The fix is the road we reported on in September. A vacant three-storey block of 18 flats on Spencer Close would be demolished. An 83-metre road would replace it, linking Towpath Crescent and Devonshire Avenue.
Planning permission was granted on 15 September, subject to a section 106 legal agreement still being negotiated. That agreement will include biodiversity net gain.
ThamesWey Developments, another council-owned company, will procure and pay for the work. The report says the final building cost “is still being developed”. The council would maintain the road for about a year before adoption. By then the highway authority will be West Surrey Council.
The report lists the risks the council would carry:
- ThamesWey Developments running out of money before the road is built
- a delay in adoption, leaving the council responsible for upkeep for longer
- complaints from residents about construction traffic, noise and disruption
No call-in
The Executive is asked to declare the decisions urgent. That would switch off call-in, the step that lets councillors send a decision back for scrutiny before it takes effect. The report says any delay “would be seriously prejudicial to the interests of the Council”. The reasons for urgency must be reported to a later Full Council.
The wider ThamesWey sale
The report also mentions a separate plan to turn much of the debt ThamesWey Housing owes the council into shares. It says that would make the company easier to sell but would not bring in any cash. Recovering the money would still depend on what the company sells for.
Overall, the proposals would raise the council’s capital financing requirement, a measure of its underlying need to borrow, by about £1.4 million. The report says this fits within the borrowing limits agreed on 2 March 2026.
Other council property sales this autumn are covered in our September asset sales report.
What it means for you
If you live on the Copper phase, your road access should become permanent and adopted. Expect construction work once the legal agreement is signed. The report says the contractor must have a plan for liaising with residents.
If you are a council tenant anywhere in the borough, the £275,000 a year comes out of the Housing Revenue Account, which is funded by council rents. The report says the account has enough borrowing headroom to absorb it.
Both meetings are in the Council Chamber at the Civic Offices, Gloucester Square. Both are filmed and broadcast live on the council’s website. We will report the outcome.
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