Folkestone Town Mayor Jackie Meade on Community, Charity and Civic Pride
Folkestone’s Town Mayor for 2026/27 talks to The Shepway Vox Team about unfinished business after Covid, residents priced out of the town’s success, unheard unpaid [...]
Illegal Children’s Homes: How KCC and Medway Paid Catalyst Care £2.5m
Kent County Council and Medway Council’s published records identify £2,493,697.74 paid to Catalyst Care Limited: £2,419,480.59 from KCC and £74,217.15 from Medway for [...]
University of Kent Financial Crisis: Cuts, Consultants and Merger with Greenwich
For six years the University of Kent cut jobs, closed subjects, sold financial breathing space and promised recovery. It spent £29.4 million restructuring itself and awarded [...]
East Kent Hospitals: Six Chief Executives, Nine Chairs and 15 Years of Failed Leadership
East Kent Hospitals has spent 15 years changing the cast while leaving much of the script intact. A new review says staff can still regard speaking up as pointless or [...]
KCC Pension Fund Holds £38m in Oil, Gas, Coal and Arms Firms, Including Companies Linked to Gaza
Kent’s pension fund has spent years edging away from some of the world’s dirtiest and deadliest industries. Yet the latest company-level records show the job isn’t [...]
Child Pedestrian Casualties Heavily Concentrated in Kent’s Poorest Areas
Official figures expose widening gap in road deaths and injuries between poor and wealthy postcodes across Kent & Medway. Children living in some of Kent’s poorest [...]
From Unsafe Homes to a Top-Rated Council Landlord: How the East Kent Housing Scandal Forced Folkestone & Hythe to Rebuild
Folkestone & Hythe District Council has earned the regulator’s highest consumer grade. It deserves proper credit. But C1 didn’t fall from a clear blue sky. It grew [...]
The £4.925 Million Murder: Who Killed the Meaning of “Recovered” in Kent Police’s Crime Assets Claim?
Kent Police says nearly £5 million was taken from criminals in 2025/26. In this paper-trail murder mystery, a fictional Detective Inspector Ledger follows real evidence [...]
‘We Don’t Record It’: Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Procurement Waiver Claim Unravels
Folkestone & Hythe District Council told councillors that requests to bypass its normal procurement rules had fallen. Minutes later, officers admitted rejected requests [...]
Oaken Wood Quarry Expansion Moves Closer After KCC Backs Plan by Six Votes
Kent County Council hasn’t approved a quarry extension into Oaken Wood—but by keeping the site in its minerals plan, it has moved that prospect a considerable step [...]
Kent Local Government Reorganisation: The Unanswered Questions Facing Mid Kent Council
Folkestone & Hythe says it is preparing for its own abolition. Yet scrutiny revealed that the money, legal timetable, councillor workload, headquarters, assets and parish [...]
Kent NHS Trusts Paid £389m in Clinical Negligence Claims – Costliest Specialties by Trust
Looking only at gynaecology opens one window onto Kent’s clinical-negligence bill. The full ledger is a much bigger, stranger picture: four acute hospital trusts recorded [...]
Folkestone & Hythe Council Is Being Scrapped: The £130.9m Mid Kent Merger Explained
Folkestone & Hythe District Council is helping to build the authority that’ll replace it. The chosen scheme promises simpler government and savings, but its own papers [...]
Southern Water Annual Report Errors: Six Admissions, Undisclosed Controls and Unnamed Sewage Permit Failures
Southern Water has admitted that its 2025/26 reporting contained wrong financial, credit-rating and operational figures. Yet some of its answers create fresh questions about [...]
Kent County Council Audit Exposes Significant Financial Control Issues Under Reform UK
KCC’s audit papers don’t prove fraud. They reveal a circular control system in which weak training, payment workarounds and manual checks depend upon one another — [...]
Southern Water bosses’ pay: bonuses blocked as bills rise and pollution failures continue
The chief executive and finance director received no annual bonus for the second year running. But Southern Water’s accounts show why the word “bonus” tells only part [...]
Long Read: Kent Library Visits Rise as Physical Loans Fall and Costs Climb
Kent’s libraries gained almost exactly as many visits as they lost physical loans. Between 2023/24 and 2024/25, recorded visits to Kent’s libraries and mobile services [...]
Ship Street Folkestone: FHDC Backs 85-Home Orbit Scheme as Hidden Land Value and ‘400 People’ Claim Raise Questions
FHDC has approved another £132,000 for Ship Street after being told 85 homes could remove nearly 400 people from the housing waiting list. The trouble is that the list [...]
Romney Marsh Solar Farms: FHDC Asked for a Cumulative Impact Rule That Already Existed
A non-lawyer councillor stopped Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s solar motion. Five minutes later, Chief Executive Dr Susan Priest read out the repair — but [...]
Cllr David Wimble on Nigel Farage: A Pint, a Phone and ‘We Make It Up as We Go Along’
Satire occasionally arrives fully assembled. On page 45 of the latest Looker, David Wimble mocks Britain’s instant experts: “Apparently all you need to become Britain’s [...]
Kent County Council Reform UK Led Audit Committee ‘Not Effective’ as Camilla Black May Resign
Kent County Council’s only independent audit committee member says the body isn’t working, serious questions aren’t being answered and the people responsible for [...]
Why KCC’s Folkestone Library Footfall Comparison Is Nonsense: Grace Hill v Sandgate Road
Brian Collins arrived at KCC’s Cabinet meeting brandishing two figures as though he’d just cracked the Enigma code. Grace Hill library received 4,613 visits in June 2022; [...]
South Brooks Solar Farm: FHDC Signals ‘Holding Objection’ Over Romney Marsh Risks
“It just feels a bit fait accompli.” With those words, Cllr Adrian Lockwood (Lab – pictured) put his finger on the unease running through Folkestone & Hythe [...]
High Court Rules Environment Agency Can Prosecute Former Southern Water Chief Matthew Wright for Conspiracy to Defraud
A former Southern Water chief executive has failed in a High Court attempt to establish that the Environment Agency had no legal power to prosecute him for conspiracy to [...]
Why It’s So Hard to Get a GP Appointment in Folkestone & Hythe
At the crack of eight, the scramble begins. Patients ring, refresh a webpage, fill in a form or wait for somebody to decide whether their problem merits an appointment. By [...]