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

How did Peter Mitchell and his partner buy a lovely detached home in L13 — and fund millions of pounds of assets?

Dear readers – in today’s edition, we dig deeper into the world of former Labour councillor Peter Mitchell and Big Help, his sprawling group of charities and companies. The revelations in Part One of our investigation were alarming but things only get stranger in Part Two as we delve into Big Help’s finances and hear a secret recording of the man himself. 

“Had you come to see me earlier then I’d be looking to chuck you off the fucking balcony,” Mitchell appears to tell a business associate in a tape obtained by The Post, in which the charity boss refers to taking on “shitty, shitty portfolios” of properties. And if you were wondering how Mitchell might have personally benefited from his fast-growing empire, today’s story has some important clues. 

We have found evidence that a lovely red-brick home on a quiet cul-de-sac in L13 was bought by a company controlled by Mitchell and his partner Colette Goulding, a serving Liverpool councillor. Big Help has confirmed this house is the couple’s private residence but did not answer our questions about how the purchase was funded. We’ve also been looking at a private company owned by the couple that rapidly acquired assets worth £3.5 million, funded by a huge influx of funds whose origins remain unclear.

As always, this edition is a members-only affair, so if you want to read Part Two of our investigation, please join as a member now. Journalism like this takes an incredible amount of work over many months among a team of reporters and editors, and it wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have more than 1,500 members. But the truth is, we can only do more of it if we grow our pool of subscribers. The Post is still a few hundred members shy of being financially sustainable, and you can help us to get there by joining up today. If you believe Liverpool and the wider region need this kind of investigative reporting, the only way of guaranteeing it is to click that button below. 

In today’s story, we quote a spokesperson for Big Help in several places, but it is only fair to show you the group’s statement in full at the top of this newsletter. They told us: 

“At the moment, we’re not able to talk in detail about any of this, we have tried to be helpful where we can, but this is no longer possible. There are civil and criminal proceedings happening, none of which we are party to, but at which Peter Mitchell is a key witness for the plaintiff. We do not want to prejudice any of these cases, especially as our organisation is a victim in this very complicated story. We have been asked not to talk to the media by the authorities. 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, including any individuals that you reference. We look forward to speaking when we can and clearing the good name of our organisation.”

Before we get to the story and today’s mini briefing, we have some exciting news: The Post’s main staff reporter Abi Whistance has been named Young Journalist of the Year at the Regional Press Awards. It’s an amazing achievement and a testament to the quality of Abi’s reporting for us, including her months-long investigation into Big Help. The judges said she has delivered “thought-provoking investigations” and given her stories “real depth”. 

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Your Post briefing 

Wirral Council have ruled that the highly controversial vegetation growing on Hoylake Beach should be cleared. The issue has split the town over the past few years; environmentalists on one side who believe the grass should be allowed to grow freely, and their ardent opponents who believe it has robbed the town of its beach. Despite Green Party opposition, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems all voted in favour of using chemicals to prevent grass from growing (this was stopped in 2019 amid massive backlash — including from the then-Prime Minister’s wife Carrie Symonds). The council will still need to agree a management plan with Natural England, but the end seems to be nigh for this unusually bitter seaside war. 

The Echo’s long-running campaign to reveal the names of two councillors who were summonsed to court after incurring council tax debts has been won. Labour councillors Lisa Gaughan and Tom Cardwell came forward after the Information Commissioner ruled that Liverpool City Council could not withhold their identities. Cardwell said he incurred the debt during a period in which he was struggling with his mental health — with depression and acrophobia making him unable to leave his home, “much less deal with day to day payments”. Gaughan cited difficulties when her marriage broke down, but said she was working to pay off the debt with the aid of a debt charity. The issue has proven controversial. Some praised the Echo’s campaign, saying it was in the public interest to know if councillors had failed to pay their own council tax. Others saw it as an unnecessary intrusion into their private financial circumstances, especially given the issues both had faced. Both councillors apologised to their residents. 

After reading our Big Help story, the leader of the Liberal Party on Liverpool City Council got in touch to stand up for Peter Mitchell (who you might remember defected to the Liberal Party after leaving Labour). Councillor Steve Radford told us that Big Help has done “exceptional work welcoming and supporting the Ukrainian Community,” and goes on: “They have opened a help desk for housing benefits issues which I have driven up constituents. Most importantly I have had three very serious cases of very vulnerable women being made homeless. The Big Help Project has responded, not just with a home but wrap around support.” 

And a heart warming (if not actually warming) story to end with. Matt Star from Wallasey said he “absolutely loved it” after swimming an “ice mile” to help fund his friend’s cancer treatment. Joe McMillan, also from Wallasey, was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2021 and travelled to Germany for dendritic cell therapy after he stopped responding to treatment in the UK. He had been due to return for a second round of therapy in January but was unable to afford it. So Starr stepped in, training for six months to complete the challenge and raise £16,000. "I swam quite well, I swam fast... I absolutely loved it," he said.

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‘I don’t give a shite about your auditors’: The growing questions about Peter Mitchell and Big Help 

Abi Whistance and Joshi Herrmann

A few months ago, we were passed a recording of a business meeting. The tape lasts just over 40 minutes and appears to capture a meeting between the charity boss and former councillor Peter Mitchell and a man from another charity. 

Around 20 minutes into the meeting, Mitchell loses his cool with a man called Matt, who runs a charity called Noble Tree Foundation. It’s unclear exactly what they are discussing, but it sounds like Matt is asking for documents relating to a deal the two charities have been involved in. Matt mentions his auditors need to see some paperwork. Then, Mitchell flies off the handle. 

“I don’t give a shite about your auditors,” Mitchell shouts. “I don’t give a tufty fuck about your issues, Matt. Don’t lean across the table at me. Honestly, I don’t give a shite about your issues. You’ve caused all your issues.” 

Mitchell tells Matt that he hasn’t prepared the paperwork because “I couldn’t be fucking arsed”. First, Mitchell suggests Matt can sue him if he has a problem. Then he escalates.

“Had you come to see me earlier then I’d be looking to chuck you off the fucking balcony.” 

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh.

The recording – the authenticity of which is not disputed by Big Help — portrays Mitchell as a man who seamlessly switches between modes: helpful and reasonable-sounding one minute; deeply belligerent and bullying the next. In that sense, the meeting, which seems to end with an uneasy truce, with Mitchell promising to prepare the documents for a later date, provides a startling insight into his character. 

But it offers more than that. The tape also contains a crucial nugget: a revelation from Mitchell about how he might have spent the millions of pounds that poured into his charities. It’s something we suspected when we began examining his public filings last year. 

How do you find £10 million? 

In the first part of our investigation into the Big Help group, we mainly focused on Peter Mitchell’s largest entity, the charity Big Help Project. That’s the one that started over a decade ago providing food banks across Merseyside and has grown into a colossal organisation in the past few years, claiming income of almost £16 million in 2022.

But where does that money come from? And – perhaps most interestingly – where does it go?

To understand that, we need to look at a few of Peter Mitchell’s other organisations, starting with Big Help Homes CIC, the community interest company we mentioned in our first piece. 

Companies House filings show a confusing sequence of changes in the ownership of Big Help Homes. You do not need to remember all these details, but they provide a window into the multilayered complexity of Mitchell’s Big Help empire. To begin with, it was owned by Mitchell and a property dealer called Christopher Downing, who is a pivotal figure in this story.

The two men met at the 2017 Labour Party conference, and within a couple of years, Downing was selling vast tranches of properties to investment funds, most notably to the stock market-listed property fund Home REIT. What made these properties attractive to Home REIT was that Mitchell’s charity Big Help Project (and at least two other Liverpool charities he controlled) agreed to sign very long leases on them, promising to fill them with tenants eligible for housing benefit. 

Clearly, the deal needed a sweetener. Why would a charity like Big Help Project take on the huge financial risk of signing a long lease on these properties, many of which were in poor condition (on the tape, Mitchell refers to some of them as “shitty, shitty portfolios”)? The sweetener was that property dealers like Christopher Downing would make large upfront payments to charities like Big Help Project. This money was meant to give the charities enough cash to renovate the properties and pay for the other costs of filling them with tenants.

These “advance” payments were enormous: millions of pounds. But what happened to those millions? Let’s go back to Big Help Homes’ accounts. Downing resigned as a director in April 2020 and ceased to be a shareholder later that year. At this point, Colette Goulding, Mitchell's partner and a serving Labour councillor in Liverpool, replaced Downing as both a director and joint owner of Big Help Homes with Mitchell. Since then, a dizzying sequence of changes in ownership and directors have taken place at Big Help Homes, involving several other Big Help-affiliated entities. But the bottom line is that Mitchell has been a significant shareholder since he set up the company and, as of today, is its sole director. 

Christopher Downing. Photo: YouTube.

What’s interesting about Big Help Homes is how it suddenly starts expanding like crazy. The company’s accounts for the year ending January 2021 show total assets of £223,000, made up principally of cash. Two years later, in January 2023, its total assets had shot up to £10.9 million. To be clear, that means the company’s balance sheet was now more than fifty times larger than it was two years before. Roughly half of those assets are properties (£4.3 million) and the rest (£6.5 million) are shown as “other debtors due after more than one year” — in other words, cash that an unknown person is supposed to pay Big Help Homes at some point in the future.

What is driving this eye-watering growth in the business which has always been significantly controlled – one way or another – by Mitchell? You might expect that it came from outside investors who would get shares in return, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. None of the funding for the growth in assets came from what is known as “called up share capital”. That figure remains at £2. But the filings don’t give us much clue as to the real source of the money.