I went looking for every LATCo business plan in England. Here’s what I found.

In my experience, the business plan is the single most useful document a Local Authority Trading Company produces. It should be the north star for the company: the place where the shareholder, the board, the executive and the workforce all sign up to the same vision for the next few years. So I wanted to see how the sector actually does it.

Over the last few months I’ve worked through a list of 335 council-owned companies and joint ventures and gone looking for their business plans. I took out the ones that aren’t really trading companies (dormant, dissolved, brought back in-house, or holding vehicles), which left 244. Then I read everything I could download. Several plans cover a whole group of companies and some I couldn’t download, so I ended up with 26 business plans published in full or in summary, and 36 council reports, committee packs and minutes, most of them about plans that weren’t published in full. Most of the documents date from 2023 onwards, although a few go back further. That’s 62 documents covering housing companies, waste and street scene, care, children’s services, leisure, energy, regeneration and professional services.

This is the first of three articles. In this one I look at what the plans have in common. In the second I compare them against what I’d consider best practice. In the third I pull out the companies doing it well, and what everyone else can borrow from them.

Most plans are hard to find

The first finding surprised me. Of the 244 trading companies on my list, I could find a published business plan for 52, about one in five. For another 60, all I could find was the council report approving the plan. Often the plan itself had been held back as commercially sensitive. For the rest, more than half, I couldn’t find anything at all.

Some of that is legitimate. A housing company negotiating land deals, or a care company bidding against private providers, has genuinely sensitive information in its plan. But of the 36 council reports and packs I read, 23 withheld the plan or its finances altogether. In several cases the public report told me nothing more than that a plan existed. One simply read “See presentation (exempt from publication)”.

I understand why. But a business plan that no resident, opposition councillor or member of staff can read can’t do one of its main jobs, which is to tell the story of the company and build support for it. There’s a middle way, and I’ll come back to it in Part 3.

Housing dominates, and the housing story is the same everywhere

Housing and development companies made up a third of the documents I read, and their plans tell remarkably similar stories. Interest rates, build cost inflation and a weaker sales market have changed the economics of council housing companies since 2022. Debt and interest rates came up in 19 of the 62 documents, more than any other theme.

The result is a wave of resets. Several plans describe moving away from direct delivery funded by council borrowing towards partnerships, land sales or smaller pipelines. Others push profitability further out. One housing company’s plan shows it in negative net assets until 2028. Another sets out “a pathway back to profitability” by year five. These aren’t necessarily failures, but they are big changes in what the shareholder was originally promised, and the best plans say so plainly.

The same pressures, whatever the service

Outside housing, the pressures are familiar to anyone who has run a LATCo. Recruitment and retention came up in 11 documents, particularly in care, waste and children’s services. The National Living Wage and the 2025 increase in employer National Insurance come up in several plans’ cost assumptions. Decarbonisation of fleets and buildings is a growing theme. And several companies are open about how much they depend on a single council contract, often priced at cost or at break-even, which leaves them with no margin to invest and no cushion when costs move.

They’re good at purpose and vision

Now the good news. Every published plan sets out what the company is for, and six in ten do it well. Most have a clear set of strategic priorities. Fifteen of the 26 are professionally designed documents rather than long Word reports, and most are readable by a resident or councillor without a finance qualification. The median plan is 19 pages long. The days of the 150-page business plan seem to be passing, which is welcome.

I was also struck by how candid many plans are about the past. One waste company RAG-rates its own objectives from the previous year, including the ones it missed. A housing company compares its first plan with what actually happened: ten homes promised, four expected by the year end. A council report on one group company records the company’s own acknowledgement that it “has not fully delivered on its original purpose”. That honesty builds trust with the shareholder, and it’s a real strength of the sector.

They’re thin on numbers and measures

The weaknesses are just as consistent. Ten of the 25 plans I could assess contain no financial forecast at all: no budget, no multi-year projection, sometimes not even the value of the council contract. Only six set out a detailed budget for the coming year with credible forecasts beyond it.

Performance measures are weaker still. Nine plans have no KPIs at all. Where there are KPIs, they range from two measures to around seventy, and in only four plans could I trace a clear golden thread from the strategic priorities through to the measures. At least two say their measures are still to come; one says outcome indicators “will be developed in the next 12 months”.

Approval often comes too late

Finally, timing. Where I could see the approval dates, a worrying number of plans were approved well into the year they were meant to cover: three months in, six months in, and in one case almost a full year late. I know how that happens. At Norwich City Services my 2024/25 plan wasn’t approved until September 2024, thanks to a couple of elections and internal sign offs, which meant half the year had gone before we could start delivering it. The plans that get this right, like a street scene company I read whose board approved its plan in early March and took it to the shareholder committee before the year began, have built the approval timetable in from the start.

What it adds up to

Put together, the picture is of a sector that is good at saying what it wants to be, honest about where it has come from, and much weaker at showing the numbers, the measures and the analysis that would give a shareholder confidence it can get there.

In Part 2 I’ll compare these plans against what I’d consider best practice, including the analytical tools behind a good plan, and where the biggest gaps are.

Figures are drawn from 62 documents — 26 published business plans and 36 council reports, packs and minutes — collected in October 2026. Individual companies are named only as examples of good practice.

Ian Skates is the founder of the Nullam Method, a diagnostic framework for Local Authority Trading Companies, and Nullam Financial.