TG Jones: the restructuring plan goes to court

The former WHSmith high street business reaches its High Court sanction hearing on 29 June. The stakes are explicit: company documents state the business runs out of funding around the end of June and faces administration if the plan is not in place by 31 July. Owner Modella Capital has committed roughly £35 million of new funding against the closure of up to 150 of around 480 stores.

The plan is expected to proceed using the cross-class cram-down power under Part 26A – and the landlord class is not going quietly. British Land, Landsec, M&G and NewRiver are among creditors formally challenging proposals under which landlords for more than 120 stores would receive no rent for three years, with reductions across hundreds more.

For trade suppliers, the read is simple: whichever way the 29 June hearing goes, supplier obligations are inside a restructuring whose explicit alternative is administration. If you are still shipping on open terms, you are funding the turnaround.

Homebase: what creditors actually recover

The administrators’ report into the collapsed DIY chain, published this week, puts hard numbers on a question every credit manager should ask before extending a limit: what comes back when it goes wrong? Homebase failed with £803 million of debt and 2,300 jobs lost. Some 1,299 unsecured creditors submitted claims of £693 million – against which administrators expect around £800,000 to be available. That is a recovery measured in fractions of a penny in the pound, with a single £523 million claim from Ark Finco dominating the unsecured pool.

This is the arithmetic that should sit behind every credit limit review. Unsecured trade creditors of large, leveraged retail failures are not at the back of the queue – they are outside the building.

Ardmore Construction: legacy liabilities catch up

Ardmore Construction Group filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators on 11 June. The group has been under pressure from liabilities linked to historic fire-safety defects following Grenfell, with developers including Barratt, Taylor Wimpey and Bellway pursuing remediation claims. Its latest accounts show a £42.6 million pre-tax loss on revenue of £343.8 million.

This failure is different in kind from the cost-pressure collapses we have tracked through 2026. It is a legacy-liability event – and it will not be the last. Any business assessing contractor credit risk should now treat building-safety remediation exposure as a named risk factor alongside margin and pipeline, and subcontractors and suppliers into the Ardmore chain should verify exposure immediately.

Claire’s: closure, then the phoenix

Claire’s closed its last UK standalone stores by April with around 1,300 job losses, leaving 365 concessions trading inside larger stores. In May it was confirmed that French entrepreneur Julien Jarjoura, who operates Claire’s in France, Austria, Portugal and Spain, will reopen around 50 UK stores from June.

The creditor lesson sits in the sequence: the entity that owed the money has gone; the brand returns under new ownership with a clean balance sheet. Suppliers courting the relaunched business should price the history into the terms, not just the order.

Quiz: the end of the line

Following the administration we covered in our May update, Quiz’s remaining stores close by the end of June. Trade creditors of £6.1 million sit inside a third administration in six years. The file is closing – and the lesson stands: repeated administrations are a structural signal, not bad luck.