Everything Adds Up Except the Future: How Kent’s £1.25bn Budget Balances on Delay, Denial and Disappearing Millions

Kent County Council’s Draft Statement of accounts 2024/25 have arrived — spreadsheeted, formatted, and radiating confidence — with what appears to be a balanced and responsible financial performance. But beneath the Tories tidy tables and bureaucratic calm lies a subtler truth: the books may balance, but the service does not. And if you think the cavalry is coming, forget it — there is only the hill.

Service-Level Underspends and Overspends

The revenue story begins at the top: a final General Fund revenue budget of £1,252.4 million, set with the kind of confidence that only large round numbers can provide. By year-end, Kent had underspent this total by £4.104 million, a 0.33% variance that sounds small enough to ignore but large enough to prove everything is under control. In reality, this was achieved not by trimming fat, but by quietly rationing ambition. The books balanced, yes — but largely through managed delays, short-term fixes, and some high-speed mental arithmetic. It’s a little like painting the whole house just around the edges where the visitors will look.

The council reported a modest overall underspend of £4.104 million on its General Fund. But this headline figure obscures far more than it reveals. Underneath it all sits a familiar pattern of overspending in statutory services offset by windfall underspends in areas of discretionary retreat.

Overspends include:

• Adult Social Care: £27.9m overspend — 47.2% of total overspending. This includes £12.5m for older people and £11.2m for working-age adults.
• Children’s Services: £22.1m overspend — 37.4% of the total. Mostly caused by rising placement costs and spiralling SEN transport.
• Integrated Children’s Services (ICS): £6.5m overspend — 11% of the overspend pile, driven by legal costs and staffing instability.

Underspends include:

• Home to School Transport: £6.4m underspend — about 26.2% of all service-level underspending.
• Education Management: £5.1m — 20.9%.
• Highways & Transportation: £6.6m — the largest at 27.0% of underspending.

The financial equivalent of whack-a-mole doesn’t resolve anything. Sometimes underspending sounds like a good thing – especially if you don’t ask what wasn’t delivered. And what wasn’t delivered in 2024/25 includes delayed educational programmes, slowed housing interventions, and health initiatives that quietly missed the bus.

Budget monitoring has evolved into its own genre — performance statistics with the suspense of a thriller and the logic of a surrealist painting. One department’s underspend becomes another’s void. Targets are hit not by service improvement, but by shrinking the ambition until it fits the budget.

The S151 Officer was clear that these overspends were largely driven by demand-led pressures in statutory services where there is limited scope for the council to control or reduce expenditure in the short term. 

Where Did the Underspends Go?

The underspends didn’t return to the frontline. A total of £59.6 million was transferred to bolster reserves, a move that performs fiscal responsibility but conceals service erosion.

• Earmarked Reserves grew by £48.6m.
• School Reserves increased £7.4m.
• The Budget Equalisation Reserve rose by £8.2m.

Reserves are the public sector’s mattress — you can hide all manner of problems under them, until someone tries to sleep. In his outturn report, the finance chief described these reserve transfers as prudent financial management and essential to support budget sustainability in future years. Translation: it’s money parked for the battles of tomorrow, even if today’s wounds remain untreated. In practice, they have become financial prosthetics: essential for balance, but no substitute for real legs.

The philosophy is simple: spend just enough to keep the spreadsheet happy, and save just enough to avoid attention. It’s budgeting as camouflage. Sometimes it feels like the money is in the building, it’s just not allowed out of its meeting.

Capital Slippage: A Growth Industry

Over in the world of capital, the financial theatre gets more elaborate. The council originally budgeted £263.2 million for investment, but revised this upwards to £314.2 million. By the end of the year, just £140.1 million had been spent. That left an eye-watering £174.1 million underspend, or a 55.4% shortfall against the revised programme. This isn’t careful financial planning — it’s optimistic fiction. Capital budgets are often the playground of overpromising and underdelivering, but few councils do it with such unflappable poise.

 

Of the underspend, £111.6 million was rephased — which is budget-speak for we’ll do it later, probably. That leaves £62.5 million that simply didn’t materialise in bricks, broadband, or buses. For the public, the reality is stark: money was available, but the outcomes never left the spreadsheet. If delivering capital projects is like a relay race, Kent seems to have misplaced the baton. The report dryly notes that slippage reflects planning delays, contractor capacity issues, and supply chain problems, which now form part of the council’s accepted annual rhythm. In other words, missing the target has become a target in itself.

Capital investment underspent by £174.1 million, a figure that does not reflect efficiency but paralysis.

• £111.6m of this was rephased into 2025/26 and later.
• Major slippage included the High Needs Programme, Basic Needs Education, and Digital Infrastructure.

Rephasing is a euphemism for failure to deliver. Projects don’t get cancelled — they simply vanish into a procedural fog. This is local government project management where timelines are predictions and delivery is theoretical.

At this scale, capital delivery has become a form of performance art — building the idea of a project, presenting it to Cabinet, then postponing it indefinitely. Even a fog runs out of room eventually.

2025/26: The Pre-Built Overspend

If 2024/25 was dramatic, 2025/26 is the sequel — same plot, higher stakes. The budget is rising by £200.1 million, with £150.3 million from core funding and the rest sourced from reserves and asset sales. That’s not a plan. That’s a clearance sale.

The increases are already allocated: £49.3 million to Adult Social Care and Health, £40.4 million to Children, Young People and Education. There’s no contingency here. These are future overspends pre-authorised in advance. The finance officer warns that delivering a balanced budget in 2025/26 will be significantly more challenging, with delivery risks now embedded in both revenue and capital planning. So while the council technically meets its statutory duties, it does so while walking a financial tightrope over a spreadsheet canyon.

£7.8 million is earmarked to deal with last year’s pressures. Another £4 million is already pencilled in for children’s placements, because apparently hope is no longer part of the process.

Former Council Leader Roger Gough framed the situation at the Council budget meeting, in Feb 2025, with grim poetry: there is no cavalry coming over the hill — there is only the hill.

Meanwhile, £111.2 million of capital spend has been rephased into 2025/26 and beyond. The Budget Report warns that a balanced budget in 2026/27 is unlikely without either a miracle or a chainsaw.

Managing a crisis often means putting up more signs explaining everything is under control.

There is a peculiar optimism in writing future budgets based on savings that haven’t happened yet, funded by receipts that don’t exist, for services not yet delivered. Savings do not require that efficiencies be recorded net of up-front investment costs. If you spend money to save money, you count the money saved but not the money spent in the process. By this logic, scrapping posts and hiring in consultants counts as a total saving.

Ring fencing gives the illusion of accountability without the inconvenience of measurable delivery.

Everything Adds Up Except the Future

The books for 2024/25 may appear balanced, but only through ritual: delay the deliverables, raid the reserves, shift the pressure forward. It is technically accurate and strategically hollow.

This isn’t budgeting. It’s theatre. Everything adds up — except the future. And the past. And parts of the present.

Opposition councillors described the process as holding your finger in a hole in the dam and hoping it doesn’t burst. One could be forgiven for thinking the finger has been there for some time.

The budget now resembles a ghost story told with Excel — chilling, repetitive, and all too familiar. And through it all, the narrative continues: statutory demand outpaces capacity, capital ambition is pushed into tomorrow, and each year’s budget requires a little more theatre to hold together.

Yes, the spreadsheets reconcile. But what we’re witnessing is a well-rehearsed illusion — a council balancing on rephased projects, borrowed time, and a spreadsheet that insists everything is fine.

And let’s not forget the peculiar arithmetic at play. Savings do not require that efficiencies be recorded net of up-front investment costs. In other words, if you spend money to save money, you count the money saved but not the money spent in the process. By this logic, scrapping posts and hiring in consultants counts as a total saving. It’s fiscal slight-of-hand — and it’s been embedded into the culture.

Now, as the books close on 2024/25, they pass not just into storage, but into the hands of Reform UK. The newly elected stewards of Kent’s finances are preparing to steer the County — despite not quite knowing what the spanners are for. And if they think they’ve inherited a fine machine, they may want to look again at the number of parts left over.

Everything adds up. Except the future.

The Shepway Vox Team

Discernibly Distinguished Dissent