FOI Discrepancies Throw Folkestone & Hythe District Council Temporary Accommodation Costs Into Doubt

Folkestone & Hythe District Council (FHDC) has once again managed the impossible: spending millions of pounds on Temporary Accommodation without actually knowing how much it spent. The council’s latest claim is that it forked out £378,725 in 2022/23, £506,611 in 2023/24 and £926,500 in 2024/25.

Unfortunately for FHDC, it also told KentOnline that the figures were £315,289, £473,181 and £895,509 respectively. That’s a handy little discrepancy of nearly £128,000 — enough to keep a dozen families in B&Bs for a month. This is not the first time FHDC has had trouble with numbers; it has a track record of producing financial spaghetti whenever anyone asks a straightforward question.

Now, when pressed to explain why its accounts resemble the back of a beer mat, the council came up with a corker. Four separate FOI requests between January 2024 and April 2025 produced different totals. One was flat-out wrong, they admitted, because a “junior officer” had “erroneously extracted” the data. In classic Whitehall-farce style, the council then insisted the remaining responses were “substantially consistent.” Translation: consistently inconsistent. When figures for 2023/24 veer from £473,181 to £818,073, that’s not consistency — that’s chaos. In public finance, accuracy matters. FHDC seems to think accuracy is optional.

A Pattern of Conflicting Numbers

For 2022/23, depending on which document you pick up, the council spent £378,725, £219,469, or £315,289. For 2023/24, the options are £473,181, £506,611, or — if you’re feeling lucky — £818,072. And in 2024/25, it’s either £926,573 or £895,509. When you can’t tell whether your bill is half a million or nearly a million, something is seriously wrong.

The official excuse? Different systems. Apparently, pulling figures from the housing database gives you one number, and pulling them from the finance database gives you another. That’s not a quirk, it’s a systemic failure. If your finance system and your housing system can’t agree, you don’t need a new IT package — you need a crash course in arithmetic.

The Shepway Vox Investigation: The Smoking Calculator

As Shepway Vox revealed in its Truth on Hold investigation, FOI responses don’t just vary on money — they even contradict each other on the number of homeless households in Temporary Accommodation. It’s one thing not to know your balance sheet, quite another not to know how many families you’re housing. Unsurprisingly, FHDC has also failed to hit the statutory target for FOI responses every year since 2017. The culture is clear: if in doubt, muddle it out.

Shepway Vox then went further, uncovering “serious discrepancies” in the Temporary Accommodation figures. For 2023/24 alone, the council told the public anything from £473,181 to £818,073 — a whopping £344,891 gap. At that point, you might as well pick a number out of a hat.

Why It Matters

This is not about clerical errors. These are hundreds of thousands of pounds going unaccounted for in one of the council’s biggest areas of spend. When an authority can’t say where nearly half a million quid went, residents are entitled to ask: what else don’t you know?

The defence that figures were “substantially consistent” is laughable. If your bank statement claimed your mortgage payment, or rent payment was “substantially consistent” with your actual balance, you’d be bankrupt in a month. Public money deserves better than weasel words.

A Local Crisis, A National Joke

Temporary Accommodation costs are soaring nationwide. Councils warn they’re being bankrupted by homelessness, and FHDC is no exception. But while other councils struggle with rising costs, FHDC is struggling with basic sums. Its FOI record is a hall of mirrors, its explanations a masterclass in buck-passing, and its housing figures less reliable than a pub quiz team after closing time.

The Bottom Line

This isn’t just about Temporary Accommodation. It’s about trust, competence, and accountability. FHDC has shown that when challenged, it would rather throw junior staff under the bus than fix its systems. Numbers don’t lie — but apparently, in Folkestone, they come in multiple flavours depending on which officer you ask.

One has to ask what other data they have released by FOI is correct. There is reasonable cause for doubt. Until the council can say with certainty whether it spent half a million or nearly a million, residents will rightly conclude that the only thing consistent about FHDC’s FoI data is its inconsistency. And if we can’t believe this data, then what else can’t we believe? We don’t need bullshit data— we need the truth, whether the information is released under FOI, buried in the accounts, or hidden in their spend data.

If you’ve a story about the Council, or anything else, then please do contact us in confidence – at: TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me 

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness