The company that ran a Plymouth care home branded cold and smelly left debts of more than £3m - most of which won’t be paid. The Warwick Park Care Home, in Honicknowle, ceased trading in January with 21 residents having to be rehomed. Now it has emerged that the company which ran it, Warwick Park House Ltd, had huge debts and owed Union Bank of
India £2.7m. It also owes former employees nearly £50,000 and HM Revenue and Customs £320,000 in unpaid Income Tax. The company and now administrators Tom Grummitt and Andrew Smith, at insolvency specialist Bridgewood, have published their proposals. They said the company can’t be saved and will be liquidated and dissolved. The Warwick Park Care Home has been put on the market with a guide price of £1.6m. If it sells for that the money will go to pay off the bank, as a secured creditor, but still leave it £1.1m short. It means there is unlikely to be anything to pay preferential creditors. Administrators believe the company owes employees and the Redundancy Payments Service £46,829 in pre-administration wages and holiday pay. The company employed about 48 people. With the cash owed to HMRC added too, it means preferential creditors are expected to be left short of £366,829. An estimated 129 unsecured creditors are predicted to be owed £868,187, and overall, the administrators expect the total shortfall to creditors to amount to £2,335,016. In documents filed at Companies House, the administrator said: “Based on present information, the administrators do not think a dividend will be paid to the non-preferential unsecured creditors.” Warwick Park House Ltd’s controlling shareholder is a company called Hantona Ltd, which has also entered administration. It ran two care homes in Dorset - The Old Refectory in Swanage, and Poole’s Delph House - both of which closed in January. Jacqueline Haigh is sole director of Warwick Park House Ltd and Hantona Ltd, and is being pressed by administrators for more information. The administrators said: “The company’s director is yet to deliver up a signed statement of affairs as required by insolvency legislation and we continue to pursue the same. She has provided some, limited, information about the company’s preferential and non-preferential unsecured debts.” In January this year, confirmed Warwick Park Care Home was to shut. This came just over a month after the home was told to improve safety and leadership following a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection which said it was cold and reported “malodours". Warwick Park House had announced in December that it was to cease trading after running into financial difficulties. It then worked with the council to support residents and their families and help them move to alternative accommodation. Administrators said: “It has not proved possible to rescue the company as a going concern. By the time we were appointed plans were already in place for the relocation of all but a handful of residents to other care homes and a number of the residents had already been relocated. The process of the company ceasing to trade was well advanced and so rescue was not viable.” They added that the care home building was already attracting attention from potential purchasers. The administrators said: “The property had recently been placed on the market with a guide price of £1.6m and our agents are liaising with interested parties.” The CQC inspected Warwick Park Care Home in October 2023. It rated the home as “good” for being effective, caring and responsive, but said other aspects, including safety, needed improving, The report said: “We had received concerns from visiting healthcare professionals regarding the service being cold.” It added: “There were malodours throughout the service. The carpets throughout the service were worn and marked. The passenger lift was out of use and had been for several months.”