Revealed: money for educating excluded children funded Bolton bar owner’s social life | Bolton

The owner of a children’s home in Bolton shut down for “serious and widespread failures” spent thousands intended for educating marginalized children on drinking, foreign trips and his pub business, the Guardian can reveal.

Between 2015 and 2021, £1.5m was paid by two local authorities to a “community interest company” (CIC) run by Robert McGuinness, the main director of the children’s home. The CIC was set up to provide vocational training to children from years 9 to 11 (ages 14-16) excluded from mainstream schools.

Profits from the CIC should, by law, have benefited the community. Instead, McGuinness, a Lamborghini-driving plasterer turned pub landlord, loaned his bar business £100,000 from the CIC. He also spent thousands from the CIC bank account on his own social life from him, as well as on foreign trips to Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Thailand, the Guardian has learned.

The bar has since gone bankrupt and the liquidator says “there is currently no prospect” of the £100,000 loan being repaid. The case highlights why children’s social care experts believe there needs to be a “seismic change” to the entire system.

Bank statements seen by the Guardian show that some nights McGuinness spent hundreds of pounds from the CIC’s account in bars and restaurants. More than £2,000 went on Airbnb stays in a single year and almost £5,000 was spent on pub furniture. A total of £182.78 was spent in a branch of Spar in Praia da Luz, Portugal, and just shy of £280 was spent across 2019 in an artisan bakery in Manchester.

Achieve Care Homes Limited was set up in 2020 by McGuinness, 34, and his parents, Alison and Francis. In January, Ofsted inspectors suspended the license of the children’s home run by the firm after finding that a boy had not bathed, changed his clothes or been provided with a home-cooked meal for four months.

It was not the first time Ofsted had expressed serious concerns about a McGuinness-run establishment. In September 2020 he tried to open an independent school in Bolton called Stanley House, charging annual fees of between £22,000 and £40,000 for children expelled from mainstream education.

It never opened, after inspectors found numerous problems including an electricity substation easily accessible to children and the lack of a playground. They also raised concerns that “leaders have not put systems in place to account for the income and expenditure for each pupil who will be funded by a local authority”.

Yet McGuinness’s children’s home business was granted permission on Tuesday to turn eight flats in Bolton into apartments for care leavers aged 16 to 18. It was classed by the council planning committee as a “permitted development”, and did not need separate approval. This is despite the local authority’s head of children’s services having concerns about the company.

Until the Guardian confronted him this week, McGuinness was a director of 11 firms, many using the “Achieve” brand. On Tuesday he resigned from Achieve Training Center CIC, which still operates two “training centres” in Bury and Bolton in Greater Manchester for children excluded from mainstream education. One is at Stanley House, the site of McGuinness’s aborted school.

The Guardian has seen evidence that the CIC’s bank account was regularly used to pay staff and contractors working on the renovation and running of the Printer’s Apprentice, a bar-restaurant in York city centre. It opened in February 2020, a month before the first lockdown, and went into liquidation in December 2020 owing £411,698.

McGuinness used the CIC debit card to buy groceries, book hotels, eat out and withdraw cash while on trips to Portugal, Belgium and Spain, and Krabi in Thailand. In 2019 the CIC bank account was used to spend more than £4,600 in pubs and restaurants and £2,264 on Airbnbs.

Payments from the CIC account included £680 for a pub employee who successfully took McGuinness to an employment tribunal for £7,341 in unpaid wages in 2020, almost £5,000 for bar furniture, and £5,680 to LWC, a trade alcohol supplier. A legal adviser who helped with the employment tribunal received £5,000 from the CIC account.

In addition, payments totaling £9,632 went from the CIC to “DMD pay”, which stood for Drink Me Dry pay. Drink Me Dry Limited was set up by McGuinness and his father in January 2018 to run the pub.

Bolton and Bury councils were the CIC’s biggest clients until very recently. Between 2015 and 2021, Bury council, along with local schools and education providers, spent £904,537 sending young people from the local pupil referral unit (PRU) to Achieve Bury, which is situated on an industrial estate just outside the town centre.

As a result of the Guardian’s investigation, a Bury council spokesperson said the local authority would not be placing any further children with Achieve. The PRU was “reviewing the current placements with the provider”, they added.

Bolton council said it spent £654,340 sending 32 children to Achieve Bury from July 2017 to November 2019. Bolton’s director of children’s services, Bernie Brown, said she stopped using Achieve when it became apparent children were “not getting the formal education that had been commissioned , sitting down doing some maths and English and functional skills work”. Instead, the children were taken on “tours” of local employers, which did not help them reintegrate into a school setting, she said.

“There’s got to be a seismic change and a seismic shift in the way that we approach this,” she added.

One witness said the work experience involved laboring on building sites, including at the house in Bolton that McGuinness was in the process of turning into a small children’s home.

Asked to explain all of these payments from the CIC account, a solicitor for the CIC insisted they were legitimate, saying: “Robert McGuinness and other members of staff have, on occasion, ‘salary-sacrificed’, such that our client directly incurred private costs of theirs, which costs were then deducted from their remuneration.”

A report from the liquidator in February revealed that Drink Me Dry owed the CIC £100,000. It also owes £125,000 to McGuinness and £52,468 to AMG Properties Limited, which is run by his parents.

The CIC lawyer said the CIC’s £100,000 loan came from “profits from its business”, despite the CIC annual accounts showing less than £8,000 profit in 2019 and less than £3,000 the year before, when Drink Me Dry was first established.

It was “a normal commercial loan that is being repaid according to its terms”, the lawyer said. Yet the liquidator’s report says “there is currently no prospect of dividend to the unsecured creditors”, including the CIC.

The CIC lawyer said the regulator investigated and considered the circumstances of the loan in 2021 and took no further action.

Councils do not license or regulate children’s homes and do not have regulatory power to shut down providers. Neither of the Achieve Training Centers has ever been registered by Ofsted, which inspects individual buildings – children’s homes, schools etc – but not the operators. This means that companies can have numerous poor inspections and continue to operate and open new ventures.

A representative for Achieve Care Homes Ltd and Robert, Alison and Francis McGuinness did not respond to a request for comment, but said: “We don’t know anything about this – you should ask Achieve CIC.”