Liberty Pipes Owes Teesside Council £1.75m — But Most Of It May Never Be Recovered...
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
2nd August 2026
Hartlepool Borough Council is said to be braced for the news that it expects to recover only around £450,000 of the more than £1.75 million pounds debt it’s claimed to be owed following the collapse of Liberty Pipes (Hartlepool) Limited, according to the company’s newly filed statement of affairs.
Hartlepool Borough Council appears in the company’s list of unsecured creditors with the Teesside & Durham Post understanding the debt recorded is said to be an eyewatering £1,754,617.28.
The balance reportedly relates to unpaid business rates owed to the Teesside Council, although the company’s statement of affairs lists the troubled Teesside council as a trade creditor and does not provide a breakdown or explanation of the debt.
Liberty Pipes entered administration on the 4th of March 2026, with insolvency firm Begbies Traynor appointed to oversee the company’s affairs. The statement of affairs estimates that Liberty Pipes has approximately £8.6 million pounds available for unsecured creditors, after secured creditors and HMRC’s preferential claim have been accounted for. However, its claimed unsecured creditors are collectively owed more than £33.5 million pounds, most of which may never be repaid.
Council may recover just 26p in every pound..
On the figures currently presented, unsecured creditors could receive approximately 25.7 pence for every £1 they are owed.
Applying that estimated return to Hartlepool Borough Council’s £1.75 million claim would mean the council could receive approximately £450,000, leaving around £1.3 million pound unpaid…
Questions over the unpaid business rates
The size of the apparent business-rates debt is likely to raise serious questions over how such a substantial liability was allowed to accumulate.
There’s currently no security recorded beside the council’s claim in the creditor schedule indicating that the supposedly ‘struggling’ Teesside Council is likely to rank alongside ordinary suppliers and other unsecured creditors rather than having any priority over the remaining assets, with Business rates providing an important source of local-government funding & likely to add to the councils already growing budget deficit estimated to be around Nine Million Pounds.
Major uncertainty over disputed £50 million loan
The potential return to Hartlepool Borough Council could fall even further because of what’s claimed to be a disputed £50 million loan involving Greensill Capital UK.
The document states that Liberty Pipes was purportedly named as a borrower under a government-backed Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan.
However, the company’s directors dispute whether Liberty Pipes is legally liable for the loan, while the security connected to it was reportedly not registered at Companies House within the required period.
If the full £50 million were eventually accepted as another unsecured claim, the amount available to each creditor would be diluted considerably.
Under that scenario, Hartlepool Borough Council’s estimated recovery could fall from approximately £450,000 to around £181,000, leaving more than £1.57 million unpaid.
Unless asset sales perform substantially better than expected, its expected that Hartlepool Borough Council, already sitting on a Nine Million Pound Budget Black Hole could be left with an unpaid balance of approximately £1.3 million pounds & likely having to be absorbed into the councils wider budget for the next financial year.