Broken Budgets, Big Promises: Will Kent’s May Candidates Fix the Financial Freefall?

Kent County Council’s finances are collapsing under the weight of rising care costs, crumbling infrastructure, and vanishing reserves. The Budget-Book-2024/25 and February 2025 Budget Report lay bare a system lurching from crisis to crisis, with essential services being gutted to stay afloat. Unless May’s incoming councillors take bold, structural action, Kent risks becoming little more than a care agency by 2028. And at this rate, the only thing spreading faster than the financial black hole might be the potholes — so mind your step on the campaign trail.

Revenue Budget: Spiralling Pressures, Vanishing Flexibility

The 2024–25 Budget Book approved in February 2024 forecasted a revenue budget based on a three-year Medium-Term Financial Plan (MTFP) to 2027. This was rapidly superseded by the 2025 Budget Report, which revised the projections, sharpening the focus on urgent pressures.

• Spending Growth (2025/26): The February 2025 report details a staggering £200.1m forecast in spending growth, with £150.3m core-funded and £49.8m externally funded. Nearly 80% of this core growth relates to adult social care, children’s social care, and home-to-school transport — reflecting inflation, demographic pressures, and contract price uplifts. This represents a 13.2% year-on-year increase in adult social care costs alone.

• Savings and Income Plans: To bridge the funding gap, the 2025/26 budget includes £61.5m in savings/income, a significant escalation from the previous year. But many of these stem not from service transformation, but from reversals of prior year shortfalls and “removal of one-offs/unachieved savings” — in effect, admitting failure in previous fiscal prudence.

• In 2025–26, Kent County Council hiked council tax by 4.99% — the maximum increase allowed without triggering a referendum. This added £80.37 to the average Band D bill, pushing the burden squarely onto residents already grappling with a cost-of-living crisis. Council tax now underpins around two-thirds of KCC’s net revenue budget, yet the tax base grew by just 1.22%, exposing the sharp limits of future growth. Kent’s funding model is teetering: households are being squeezed harder each year, while services continue to shrink.

Capital Programme: From Aspiration to Attrition

The council’s capital ambitions appear increasingly curtailed between the two documents:

• Shrinkage in Scale: The 2025/35 Draft Capital Programme slims down to £1.419bn, compared with £1.665bn outlined in the 2024/34 programme — a near £250m contraction. The reduction primarily stems from deferrals, project cancellations, and an explicit policy to avoid any new borrowing.

• Borrowing Paralysis: The Budget Book of 2024 already showed concern, capping borrowing at £464.7m over ten years. But by 2025, this has hardened into outright avoidance. This is a political rather than purely financial stance — a reluctance to accrue debt at the cost of much-needed capital works in highways, infrastructure, and schools.

• Flexible Capital Receipts: The use of asset sale proceeds to fund revenue expenditure in 2025/26 reduces available capital, potentially mortgaging the county’s infrastructure future for today’s operating costs.

Reserves: Eroded Safety Net

• Plummeting Balances: Kent’s usable revenue reserves stood at £357.6m at the end of 2023/24, a £33.8m (8.6%) decline from the previous year. The general reserve — the true buffer against financial shocks — sat just above the 5% floor of the net revenue budget, the council’s own minimum.

• Risk Acknowledgement: Both documents acknowledge that reserves now pose a greater risk to financial resilience than debt — a stark admission in the face of rising inflation, volatile interest rates, and national funding uncertainty.

• Safety Valve Contributions: £36.2m is earmarked to offset the DSG (Dedicated Schools Grant) deficit under the “Safety Valve” agreement, further tying up reserves for long-term deficit repayment rather than immediate contingency.

Structural Critique: Institutionalising Austerity

Despite its technocratic language, the 2025 Budget Report reads like a quiet surrender to structural austerity:

• Statutory Service Domination: Over 71% of the budget is consumed by adult and children’s social care, leaving scant room for place-based services like libraries, youth provision, or economic development. The shift in priorities, while morally unavoidable, effectively hollows out local government’s broader role in community vitality.

• Inflation Assumptions: The 2025 report uses Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts from November 2024. But it acknowledges high uncertainty due to global economic instability, energy shocks, and labour market shortages — making these assumptions fragile foundations on which to build a sustainable budget.

• Capital Backlogs: Real-terms cuts to capital maintenance (especially in schools and roads) are resulting in mounting infrastructure backlogs. The council’s “emergency-only” capital policy risks long-term degradation of public assets.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Kent County Council stands at a financial crossroads. The comparison between the 2024/25 Budget Book and the February 2025 Budget Report reveals a pivot towards survival-mode budgeting: defensively structured, operationally constrained, and philosophically cautious.

If it is to avoid becoming a de facto social care agency, Kent must:

1. Reassess its no-borrowing policy, particularly when interest rates are favourable and infrastructure needs are pressing.

2. Lobby for multi-year settlements and fair funding formulas that reflect the unique pressures of large counties.

3. Ringfence reserve replenishment, not just in policy but through enforceable fiscal rules that prevent short-term raids.

4. Invest in transformative care models with measurable returns to reduce long-term pressures in adult and children’s services.

Given all of this, what will those elected in May actually do to halt the decline? What will you say to residents on the doorstep when they ask why they’re paying more and getting less? For voters, the challenge is just as clear: demand answers. We’ve created a simple, downloadable list of 20 questions you can ask any candidate who comes knocking — questions that cut through the platitudes and force real answers on the future of your services, your taxes, and your community. And one more thing — will there be any public hustings, or are Kent’s election candidates hoping to dodge the scrutiny like they dodge the potholes on the campaign trail?

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness