At Folkestone & Hythe District Council, transparency has become something of a myth. Between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2025, the council failed to meet its own Key Performance Indicator (KPI) every single year: to respond to 90% of Freedom of Information (FOI) and Environmental Information Regulation (EIR) requests within the statutory 20 working days. That’s not a blip. That’s a culture.
FOI Law 101: Not Optional
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 is not an administrative nicety. It is law. Section 10 requires public authorities to respond to requests “promptly and in any event not later than the twentieth working day following the date of receipt.”
To align with this, the council set its own internal target: to answer 90% of FOI/EIR requests within 20 working days. This is a sensible benchmark. Unfortunately, over the past eight years, Folkestone & Hythe District Council has missed that target with the regularity of a broken clock.
How FOI Works: A Simple Process with Unnecessary Delays
To be clear, the FOI process is not complex. Here’s how it works:
- A resident submits an FOI request to the council.
- The request is received by a dedicated FOI officer, whose job is to coordinate the response.
- That officer forwards the request to the relevant council department(s) holding the requested information.
- Those departments are expected to retrieve the information and return it to the FOI officer.
- If necessary, the FOI officer redacts sensitive personal data or exemptions under the Act.
- The finalised response is then sent back to the resident.
In principle, this is a smooth relay. In practice, it often collapses somewhere around step 3 or 4. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not usually the FOI officer who is to blame. Rather, it is the council departments that either delay responding, fail to engage, or return incorrect or incomplete information.
In other words, the bottleneck lies not in the gatekeeper, but in the departments who refuse to open the gates. And even when they do, they often serve up bad data.
The Performance Record: Consistently Underwhelming
Year after year, the target was missed. Not once did the council hit the bar it set for itself. If the aim was to normalise failure, mission accomplished.
The Forgotten Years
In 2017/18, the council reported:
“We received 637 requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and achieved 83% of responses within the 20 working day deadline.”
A poor start, followed by an even poorer year in 2018/19:
“We received 689 requests … and achieved 79.2% of responses within the 20 working day deadline.”
There was no crisis response, no overhaul of systems. The council quietly accepted failure as the new norm. Across these years 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23, results wobbled between 84% and 88.7% – never good enough, never explained.
Responsibility in Office: Fuller & Field
These failings didn’t happen in a vacuum. Cllr Gary Fuller (Liberal Democrat) is the current Cabinet Member for Resident Engagement and Accountability, with direct responsibility for FOI KPIs. Under his stewardship, the council has yet to meet the FOI target.
For a Cabinet Member who received nearly £18,000 in allowances in 2024/25, Cllr Fuller certainly does not appear to be short-changed. Since his re-election in May 2023, he has held Cabinet responsibility for Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Requests. Yet during his time in post, the council has continued its uninterrupted streak of failing to meet the 90% KPI. Despite this ongoing underperformance, his allowances remain unaffected.
His predecessor, former Cllr Ray Field, held the role for four years and similarly failed to make any discernible impact on the KPI. At no point under his tenure did the council achieve its own benchmark.
In light of these facts, one must reasonably ask: is Cllr Fuller — like his predecessor — value for money?
2023/24: Performance Hits a Low
In 2023/24, the council reached its second lowest level of recorded FOI compliance: just 82.1%. It finally offered an explanation:
“The target has not been met due to the significant increase in the number of FOI requests and a reduction in officer capacity to respond to them. Additional officer time and external agency support has now been identified for 2024–25, along with refreshed training for service teams and more proactive redaction support.”
Translation: after years of missed targets, the council now plans to try. That sound you hear is transparency arriving eight years late and out of breath.
FOI Meets Reality: Data Failures Across the Board
What happens when Freedom of Information is badly managed? It’s not just about the occasional missed deadline or a lost email—it’s about rot setting into the foundations of public accountability.
On 26 June 2025, Shepway Vox reported that the council had issued contradictory responses to FOI requests concerning Prohibition Orders on unsafe housing. In one reply, the council stated it had served 12 Prohibition Orders; in another, it said 0. This wasn’t a semantic mix-up. It was a black hole in public safety data.
“Folkestone & Hythe District Council … cannot provide consistent data on … Prohibition Orders.”
“If they’re getting the numbers this wrong, how can we know whether any enforcement was actually carried out at all?”
But the problem is far from confined to housing enforcement.
In May 2025, FOI responses uncovered wildly inconsistent figures on the council’s temporary accommodation spending. In one response, the total cost was given as £818,072.91. In another, it was £473,181.63. That’s a staggering discrepancy of nearly £345,000—and not one the council has yet publicly reconciled.
And yes, even dog poo data has gone walkies. As revealed in Shepway Vox’s investigation on 28 June 2025, FOI responses about dog fouling enforcement varied sharply depending on who asked and when. Sometimes there were reports of fixed penalty notices; other times, nothing at all. The data is inconsistent, incomplete, or just plain contradictory.
Yet these are just the headline examples. As Shepway Vox notes:
“It’s not just housing enforcement, temporary accommodation costs or dog fouling. Almost every service area FOI touches seems to produce confusion, contradiction, or flat-out nonsense.”
From planning enforcement to contract spend, environmental breaches to council tax collection—if it’s held by the council and someone requests it, the odds of receiving timely, accurate, and consistent data are remarkably low. This is not an isolated technical glitch. It is a system-wide failure of information governance.
And while the council clings to its KPI charts and redaction templates, the bigger picture couldn’t be clearer: if they can’t get the basic facts right, what confidence can the public have in any of it?
Money Matters: Conflicting Figures on Housing Costs
FOI requests revealed another problem: the council has reported wildly different figures for its temporary accommodation costs.
One response listed the total spend as £818,072.91. Another stated £473,181.63. The difference? Nearly £345,000.
As Shepway Vox asked:
“Which, if any, of the published figures for Temporary Accommodation costs are accurate?”
Discrepancies of that magnitude are not trivial. They’re the kind of figures that should make any councillor pause. That they did not is telling.
And it’s not just housing enforcement, accommodation costs, or even the infamous “dog poo” data where the council struggles to tell the truth. Across a wide spectrum of FOI and EIR categories, residents receive responses that are not only late, but frequently inconsistent, misleading, or factually incorrect. It is a systemic problem, not a few isolated mishaps. The issue extends well beyond three departments—it is embedded across the council.
A Late Flourish: Q4 2024/25
In the fourth quarter of 2024/25, the council managed 95% compliance. It was a rare moment of competence.
Yet the overall year still fell short, ending at 87%, and another “no” was recorded under KPI achievement.
Time’s Up: What Should Happen Next
This isn’t just about statistics. It’s about trust. It’s about legality. It’s about whether a council can manage its own data, respond to residents, and be held accountable.
The following steps are overdue:
- An independent audit of the council’s FOI handling and financial reporting.
- A public statement from the current Cabinet Member accepting responsibility.
- Formal scrutiny by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) into persistent non-compliance.
Because when a council fails to meet a legal duty for eight consecutive years, what you’re seeing is no longer oversight.
It’s policy.
We would be interested in hearing about your experiences of Fokestone & Hythe District Council. Email: TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me in confidence.
The Shepway Vox Team
The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness
