Exclusive: The mystery £5m loans to companies owned by a Liverpool councillor and disgraced charity boss

The Big Help empire seems to be on the brink of collapse. But glaring questions about its finances continue to pile up

By Abi Whistance

A few weeks ago, Peter Mitchell, the former boss of Big Help Project, appeared as witness in the High Court in Leeds, where the presiding judge would later admonish him as a “slippery character with an obvious and callous disregard for truth”. Mitchell was testifying in a bitter years-long dispute between two property dealers, one of whom had once been a close associate of Mitchell’s — but no longer. Mitchell, as the judge said, was the kind of guy who “would speak effusively for his friends…until they are his enemies, when he will turn on them with wholehearted venom.” 

Two years ago, Mitchell was living the high life. As the CEO and Chair of a huge UK-wide charity — and the boss of nearly 30 connected for-profit and community interest companies — he was managing thousands of pounds from local authorities per week to house the homeless. Over the decade he chaired Big Help Project, he’d been invited to Downing Street, photographed with members of the House of Lords and praised by local newspapers for his charitable endeavours. Today, he’s fallen from grace, having resigned from his roles at Big Help Project, and the charity is now the subject of an active inquiry by the Charity Commission.

Mitchell’s name may sound familiar to Post readers from Part One and Part Two of our investigation, which we would recommend catching up on before you proceed with this story. Those initial articles exposed Big Help Project for its inadequate treatment of vulnerable tenants and raised major questions about the possible misappropriation of millions of pounds. 

Thanks to new a financial filing, The Post can now reveal that Peter Mitchell and Big Help Project’s other trustees moved a net £5.5 million out of the charity and into private for-profit companies mostly owned by Mitchell and his partner, Colette Goulding — a sitting Labour councillor for West Derby Muirhead.

Furthermore, interviews with former Big Help Project employees suggest the end is nigh for the charity, with a letter sent out in July warning staff of redundancies. 

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh. L: Peter Mitchell in July 2024. R: Colette Goulding

Since our initial investigations, Big Help Project has relinquished 600 properties that it had been renting from a landlord called Home REIT, and it’s begun withdrawing its homelessness support across the UK. Plus, earlier this month, an organisation that made a loan to a part of Big Help Project initiated formal legal proceedings to get its money back.

“It’s abhorrent that it appears that £5.5 million, potentially of public funds, has been moved into their private companies,” says Carl Cashman, leader of the Lib Dems in Liverpool, adding that he would “call on Goulding to consider her position and to resign immediately”, as well as issue an apology. “Do the Labour Party, after everything that's gone on in the past with potential corruption within the council, really want to protect someone who has been involved in a massive amount of money being moved out of a charity?”

We approached Colette Goulding for comment, but received no reply. In response to detailed questions for this article, a Big Help Project spokesperson told us: 

“Peter Mitchell was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer in early summer and is currently receiving daily invasive treatment. As a result of this he resigned from the board of trustees of the Big Help Project in early July. He has no involvement in the running of Big Help Project and it would be completely inappropriate for him to comment on any issue involving the Charity. A completely new board has been appointed to take the charity forward, it continues to work closely with its legal advisors Brabners and with the Charity Commission and will not be making any further public comments while the investigation continues.”

In her judgement dated 6th August, judge Claire Jackson wrote before criticising Mitchell’s behaviour that “Mr Mitchell is ill, and I have taken this into account in my assessment of him as a witness”. A month earlier, shortly after the General Election in July, we reported that Mitchell attended Labour North West’s victory drinks at Freight Island in Manchester. 

Regardless of his current state of health, this story is about Mitchell’s behaviour over the decade he was running the Big Help empire and their consequences today. The Charity Commission also has no jurisdiction over large parts of the wider Big Help empire. That's why we think broader public accountability matters here.

Falling like dominoes

Let’s begin with the first indication that Big Help Project is on the brink of collapse. Its former charity partner, Noble Tree Foundation, once operated 470 properties around the country. Then, in November last year, the Charity Commission previewed what was coming next for Big Help Project: an inquiry into Noble Tree. The Commission said it was concerned about potential “conflicts of interest”. 

By June this year, Noble Tree had gone into administration. A short statement on its website blames “a dysfunctional UK housing market”. However, a filing on Companies House says the Charity Commission inquiry had led to local authorities withdrawing business contracts from Noble Tree. That same filing also claims that Noble Tree is owed £1 million by Big Help Project.

As we touched upon in the first part of our investigation, both Big Help Project and Noble Tree had close ties to a now-defunct housing fund called Home REIT. Just a few weeks ago, another of Home REIT’s large associates also went into administration. 

This leaves Big Help Project as the last one standing: the only large Home REIT associate that has not yet gone bust. However, The Post has been speaking to former employees of the charity who describe the situation at Big Help Project as “rats fleeing a sinking ship”. 

According to an employee who left this year, after the Charity Commission announced its investigation in February, staff were called in for a meeting with Mitchell and trustee Andy Moorhead — a close associate of Mitchell’s and the former leader of Knowsley Council. They were told about the investigation. Despite the seriousness of the news, “there was just no panic at all,” the ex-employee says. “But we understood the implications straight away. No one is going to give [the charity] any money if you've got that red mark against you on the Commission, so they must have known the writing was on the wall.” 

Trustee Andy Moorhead. Photo: Social Value Housing

In July, around five months after this initial meeting, a letter warning of imminent redundancies was sent out to employees. The Post has seen a copy of this letter, which says the Charity Commission investigation has prohibited the charity from actively fundraising. “We find ourselves in a situation where we are no longer able to cover the monthly salary of staff,” it says, adding that the charity is considering pulling its services.

Now, according to two former employees and a source close to the charity, Big Help Project operates with a skeleton crew. Our sources tell us only a handful of full-time staff members remain in their offices: those who work in debt advice and welfare and benefits. The rest have been given two months’ notice or moved across to other employment within the Big Help empire — including at Knowsley Foodbank and Southport Football Club. “It’s a dying case, it looks like it’s collapsing and shuttering,” the former employee continues. “Everyone is saying how the Big Help name is tarnished.” 

Yet according to another ex-employee, the Commission’s investigation wasn’t the first sign of trouble for the charity. Bailiffs had been visiting Big Help Project’s former offices — Hope House on Boaler Street — around twice a week throughout 2023. “It just became normal,” they say, adding that employees thought the visits had to do with another of the organisations within the Big Help network, many of which also had offices in Hope House. We asked Big Help Project about bailiffs visiting the premises, and the redundancy letter sent to employees. They repeated that while there is “plenty Peter would like to say” regarding our questions, he is unable to comment at this time due to illness. They added he is “happy to arrange a face to face on the record meeting” at a later date. 

The big selloff 

The redundancy letter fails to mention another key reason for Big Help’s forthcoming collapse: the way that over the years Mitchell moved cash out of the charity and into companies, many of which either he or his partner, West Derby Muirhead’s Labour councillor Colette Goulding, control personally. 

We revealed one example of this four months ago. As of October 2022, a for-profit company called Big Help Green Ltd (which is owned 50-50 by Mitchell and Goulding) had acquired assets of £3.5 million. These included a £310,000 house in L13 where Mitchell and Goulding themselves live, as well as £134,241 of “motor vehicles”.

Big Help Green has no obvious source of cash for buying assets on this scale. One possibility was that Mitchell had arranged for the charity he ran, Big Help Project, to provide the cash to Big Help Green. Earlier this year, we asked Big Help Project if this was the case. They responded: “What we can tell you, as we previously have, is that no trustee has ever received remuneration, benefit or loan from any of our charities, ever.” This was carefully worded, but disingenuous: providing funds to a company owned by a trustee amounts to much the same thing.

An illustration of Peter Mitchell by Jake Greenhalgh

The aforementioned High Court case involving Mitchell and his former associate, Christopher Downing, has now revealed that as early as 2020, large payments that should have been made to Big Help Project (the charity) were instead being made to Big Help Green (the private company owned by Mitchell and Goulding). Court proceedings show the judge stating that “no credible explanation has been provided to the Court as to why the second payment on this date [£500,000] was made to Big Help Green”. 

The judge goes one step further, deeming Mitchell to have “no credibility whatsoever as a witness”. “Further than that, none of his statements made at any time have any credibility to them…given Mr Mitchell’s preponderance to mak[ing] statements supporting his own personal interests and or to fight his own battles.”

New audited accounts filed by Big Help Project this month confirm the scale at which cash has been shuffled around within the Big Help empire to benefit private companies that are owned by Mitchell and Goulding.

‘Related party transactions’

Big Help Project’s failure to file audited accounts always felt like a red flag. That’s because audited accounts have to disclose what’s called “related party transactions”. This is the technical term for when two companies controlled by the same people do deals with each other. Imagine one or more individuals are sitting on both sides of the table when a deal is being negotiated between two organisations: an obvious conflict of interest. 

Big Help Project should have filed audited accounts as early as March 2021, but only posted unaudited accounts. For March 2022 it again filed unaudited accounts, but these were mysteriously removed from the Charity Commission’s website last year. At the time, the Charity Commission told us this was due to an “administrative error” but didn’t explain why those unaudited accounts were not restored to the website.

Now that it’s under close scrutiny by the Charity Commission, Big Help Project must follow the rules, and this month they finally filed audited accounts for 2022 —  including a note duly entitled “related parties disclosure”. 

This note belatedly reveals that as of 31st March 2022, Big Help Project — a charity which Mitchell had chaired and run for many years — had loaned a net £5.5 million to five companies, a staggering sum. Directly or indirectly, Mitchell has large or controlling stakes in each of these companies. The note does not break down the amounts between individual companies, nor does it offer any reason why this was a good use of the charity’s money.

Two of the five companies that received this £5.5 million have come up already in our previous reporting. One of them is the aforementioned Big Help Green: the company that bought the house where Mitchell and Goulding live. Since our last story was published, Big Help Green’s total assets have actually risen, from £3.5 million to £4.3 million. 

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh. L: Peter Mitchell. R: Colette Goulding.

The £5.5 million figure is only accurate up to March 2022. Until Big Help Project publishes its 2023 accounts (which are now already seven months late), it will not be clear whether this number has changed.

We asked Big Help Project to explain the related parties disclosure note in the 2022 accounts, and to provide a full breakdown of the £5.5 million. We also asked for comment on the remarks made about Mitchell by the High Court judge. They declined to expand on the statement reproduced at the beginning of this article. 

When we asked Liverpool City Council about the allegations against Goulding, they told us they “wouldn’t comment on this as it relates to the behaviour of an elected member” and told us to contact the Regional Labour Party.

We contacted the Regional Labour Party multiple times but they did not respond by our deadline.

A new guard?

Although Big Help Project’s newly-posted 2022 accounts are audited, that comes with a couple of serious caveats. One is that these new accounts are also “qualified”. This means that the auditors “were unable to satisfy ourselves that the Trustee’s [sic] use of the going concern basis of accounting in the preparation of financial statements is appropriate”. In plain English, the auditors cannot vouch for whether Big Help Project will actually be able to keep operating. 

This is hardly surprising. The charity has already informed employees about possible redundancies, and just a week before its 2022 accounts were signed off this month, an organisation that made a big loan to part of Big Help Project started insolvency proceedings against it. 

The new accounts also contain an update on recent comings and goings on the Big Help Project board. In summary, the old guard of trustees (Mitchell, Goulding, Paul Banks and Steven Boulger) have cleared out completely. Mitchell and Boulger only resigned as recently as July 2024. The old guard has been replaced by a new set of three trustees: Andy Moorhead, Joe Michael Birley and Bill Harper. 

Although Big Help Project’s statement to us suggests Mitchell’s resignation relates to his illness, that is not a reason for Boulger to have resigned on the same day. An equally plausible explanation is that Big Help Project is trying to show the world (including, not least, the Charity Commission) a clean break with its past. But this doesn’t wash. Andy Moorhead, who became a trustee in December 2023, is the longest-standing of the new slate. Like Mitchell and Goulding, he is another senior local Labour politician, having served as the leader of Knowsley Council from 2015 to 2018.

According to a former councillor who worked closely with Mitchell back in his Labour days, Mitchell first became friendly with Moorhead around 2015. “[Moorhead] was a bit of a Corbynista, as was Peter at the time, that’s when they started hooking up,” he says. He explains that in 2018 when Moorhead was deposed as leader during a row over selling off parks in the borough, he was out “touting for work”. This is when “[Mitchell] picked him up and put him to work”, the Labour source says. 

Since then, Moorhead has held numerous positions within the Big Help empire. The High Court case shows he was working for Big Help Project in some capacity in mid-2020. His LinkedIn page currently describes him as the National Head of Refurbishment at “Big Help Housing” (a Mitchell-owned company that has been dormant since 2018), and in 2023 Moorhead became an employee (Head of Property and Development) of another of Mitchell’s for-profit companies, Social Value Housing. Social Value Housing describes Moorhead warmly on their website as “part of the Big Help family”.

According to a former employee of the charity, trustee Bill Harper also has long standing relationships with Mitchell and Moorhead. As the owner of the Devonshire Hotel on Edge Lane, Harper has played host to Labour conferences and events over the years. The Devonshire hotel has been used for Labour events “since the dawn of time”, one councillor tells us — including for a conference for metro mayor Steve Rotheram in 2023 and a three course dinner with former Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry in 2018. This is how he became acquainted with Mitchell and Moorhead, before being appointed a Big Help Project trustee in March. 

Liverpool Council leader Liam Robinson and Liverpool metro mayor Steve Rotheram at the Devonshire Hotel in 2023. Far-right: Lisa Nandy MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Photo: X

In these circumstances, it is hard to see how Harper and (especially) Moorhead can claim to be independent of Mitchell. We asked Big Help Project about the appointment of their new board of trustees, and Mitchell’s relationships with Moorhead, Harper and Birley. They did not answer our questions. 

As the High Court judge said earlier this month, it’s hard to take Mitchell’s words particularly seriously. “While [Mitchell] painted himself in almost evangelical terms his clear disregard for the truth and taking sides was evident in court,” the judge stated. “He’s a man who will say and do as he thinks fit to achieve whatever his ambition is at the relevant time.” 

So where next for Mitchell and co? Some of the answers likely lie in a private company owned and controlled by Mitchell, Goulding and former Big Help Project trustee and director of financial planning, Paul Banks. Once again, this company works in housing, and at the time we’ve published this story it benefits from Investment Partner status with Homes England — the government’s main agency for housing funding. 

And what’s next for our investigation? We’ll be taking a trip to Wales to dig into some unusual property dealings that reflect the complicated cash merry-go-round within the wider Big Help empire.

That’s all in Part Four, which you can now read here. Our investigation is based on over a year’s worth of research and reporting from a small but mighty team of local journalists, all of whom work incredibly hard every day to hold power in our city to account. Conducting dozens of interviews, reviewing hundreds of pages worth of documents, and chasing leads wherever they might take us is only possible thanks to the generous support of our paid readership. For just £7 a month, you can help fund a renaissance of trustworthy local journalism on Merseyside and enjoy an extra two members-only stories every week.

Revisit our investigation:

• Part One: Special investigation: The collapsing world of Liverpool’s charity kingpin

•  Part Two: ‘I don’t give a shite about your auditors’: A secret recording and the growing questions about Big Help

• Part Four: Exclusive: Peter Mitchell’s company claimed to be a government partner. Unsurprisingly, that was a lie