Exclusive: Kent County Council Spends £1.1 Billion Fighting SEND Appeals — 84% of Annual Budget
Exclusive: Kent County Council (KCC) has admitted to spending over £1.1 billion in legal costs defending Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) tribunal appeals over just four financial years, according to a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
In the response dated 7 February 2025, KCC disclosed the following totals:
This brings the total legal expenditure on SEND tribunals from 2020 to 2024 to a staggering £1,145 billion.
To put this in context, the council’s entire net budget requirement by the end of 2023/24 was approximately £1.36 billion. This means that over 84% of the council’s annual budget was effectively spent, across four years, just on legal battles against families seeking SEND provision.
KCC did not provide figures for the 2024–25 financial year, explaining:
“Unfortunately, Kent County Council cannot provide any information regarding the 2024-25 financial year as this has not finished as of the current date.”
The figures were released by the Information Access Officer in the Chief Executive’s Department, under reference number 54777017. The response offered no explanation of the figures, breakdown of the costs, or information on the number or outcome of tribunal cases.
With public services already stretched and national SEND provision under increasing pressure, these figures will likely ignite fresh outrage. Parents and campaigners are expected to question why so much money was channelled into legal defence, rather than directly supporting children with additional needs.
Kent County Council has been contacted for comment.
The Shepway Vox Team
The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness
According to ITV X the spend over the last 3 years is over £2million: https://www.itv.com/news/2025-03-13/councils-spent-more-than-10m-fighting-tribunals-over-special-needs-support
Just to clarify — these figures aren’t rumours or misquotes. They come straight from a formal Freedom of Information response issued by Kent County Council’s Chief Executive’s Department on 7 February 2025 (Ref: 54777017).
KCC itself stated it spent over £1.15 billion between 2020 and 2024 on legal costs fighting SEND tribunal appeals — that’s up to 24% of its entire net revenue budget in some years.
This wasn’t leaked, guessed, or misreported—it came straight from KCC’s top executive office, and it’s been sitting uncorrected in the public domain for over four months.. It’s official. So either those numbers are accurate (and indefensible), or KCC has released wildly misleading data under FOI. Either way, someone has serious questions to answer.
So now we know — 1 in every 4 pounds of Kent County Council’s entire net revenue budget is being swallowed up by legal costs fighting parents of disabled children at SEND tribunals.
What exactly will Reform’s DOLGE team find when they finally reveal what they’ve found in early July? A former Tory bureaucracy that ran on legal fees, not care. A leadership that budgeted for litigation, not learning.
And where is Grant Thornton, the Council’s auditor in all this? Apparently asleep at the wheel — or perhaps just another case of Willful-blindness (a well-known affliction in the audit world where inconvenient truths are simply unseeable).
Because if quarter-of-budget legal spending on fighting children with special needs isn’t a red flag, one has to ask: what would be?