Folkestone & Hythe District Council FOI Fiasco Returns: Housing Data Contradictions

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has turned transparency from a legal duty into a parlour trick. Once is a mistake, twice is a pattern, three times is a habit—and this council’s habit would put most coke heads to shame. After a conveyor belt of contradictory figures, shape-shifting definitions, and uncorrected blunders, this isn’t mere incompetence; it’s contempt—an authority that can’t organise its own numbers and treats the public like mugs for daring to ask.

At a glance: The numbers which don’t reconcile

• FOI 00141256
  Question: “How many individuals are on your social housing waiting list as of 1 April 2023?”
  Answer: 3,475.

• FOI 00131277
  Question: “How many people are on the Housing List on 1 April 2023?”
  Answer: “Unobtainable as it was a Saturday.”
  Substitute provided: 1,646 as at Monday, 3 April 2023.

• Gap: 1,829 people for the same point in time, with no coherent explanation.
  “People” and “individuals” mean the same thing in plain English. If the 1 April snapshot existed for one response, it cannot simultaneously be “unobtainable” for another. Both answers cannot be true.

Two FoIs one date: How did we get here?

Strip it to essentials. Two requesters asked the same question about the same date. The council produced:

1. A precise figure for Saturday, 1 April 2023; and

2. A claim that no figure for 1 April 2023 could be produced because it was a Saturday, plus a much lower number for the following Monday.

That is not a nuance problem; it is a basic factual contradiction. Any competent information-governance process would catch this before release. The fact it reached the public domain tells its own story: the checks either don’t exist or don’t work and all of this happening under the leadership of the Chief Executive of Folkestone & Hythe District Council: Dr Susan Priest – (pictured).

“It was a Saturday”: possible explanations – and why they don’t wash.

Authorities sometimes struggle to extract weekend snapshots due to IT processes (batch jobs, end-of-day postings, read-only windows). Even if that were true here, it still wouldn’t explain why another team could produce a 1 April number.

Common failure modes—and how they fall short:

• Households vs people. If one answer counted households and the other people, say so. Define it. Publish the conversion (e.g., average people per household). The council didn’t.

• Live vs cleansed data. If one figure came from an operational system and another from a deduplicated report, annotate both with source, timestamp, and validation steps. The council didn’t.

• Inclusions/exclusions. Suspended cases, ineligible applicants, duplicates, or “banded but inactive” entries can inflate counts. If rules differ, publish the rules. The council didn’t.

• Timing. If the Saturday snapshot is impossible, then 3,475 cannot be presented as “as of 1 April 2023.” If it is possible, the “unobtainable” claim is false. Pick one. The council didn’t.

In short: FHDC must reconcile its own numbers. It hasn’t.

Not a one-off: a pattern that signals systemic weakness

Residents have seen suspect figures in other areas—temporary accommodation costs, bailiff referrals, and now the number of people/individuals on the housing waiting list. When unrelated datasets across the council display the same failure modes—contradictory counts, elastic definitions, and zero published corrections—you’re not looking at isolated blunders but a systemic data-governance failure. Nor is it confined to housing: 2025 has already produced suspect figures across other service areas. Each inconsistency left uncorrected debits the council’s credibility and increases the reputational damage; if it can’t agree with itself, why should anyone else treat its numbers as anything more than guesswork?

What FoI requires- and what it absolutely doesn’t

Here is the uncomfortable legal reality that FHDC seems to hide behind: responses to Freedom of Information requests do not need to be true. Neither the FOIA 2000 itself, nor the two statutory Codes of Practice issued under it, explicitly require the information disclosed to be “truthful” or “reliable.” FOI is an access regime, not an accuracy guarantee. It compels a council to confirm whether information is held and to communicate the recorded information it holds (subject to exemptions). If the records are wrong, FOI will faithfully deliver wrong records.

If you actually want truth or accountability, you must reach for other levers: the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014, the Public Records Act 1958, the common law duty of candour, or judicial review principles. In other words: FOI opens the filing cabinet; those other regimes punish what’s inside if it’s misleading, unlawful, or incompetent.

That is precisely why records management and quality assurance matter. Leaders waving a compliant FOI response as proof of truth are missing the point—or hoping you will.

The Council’s own rulebook raises the standard

FHDC’s constitution—the council’s legal framework—states that chief officers must ensure staff are aware of their responsibilities under Data Protection and Freedom of Information legislation. Hitting a 20-working-day deadline while releasing incoherent, irreconcilable figures is not good governance; it’s box-ticking.

Accountability should be unmistakable:

• Section 151 Officer — stewardship of reliable financial and management information.

• Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) — information integrity and risk controls across systems.

• Monitoring Officer — lawfulness and proper governance, preventing habitual public misstatement.

• Data Protection Officer — personal-data accuracy and hygiene, a bellwether for broader data quality.

If these roles function, contradictions like this are stopped before publication.

This is another governance failure, not a comm’s glitch

This isn’t about clumsy wording. It’s about a council apparently unable—or unwilling—to maintain a single source of truth for critical public statistics. When press lines, FOI responses, and committee papers can’t agree, the problem is upstream: weak ownership, no standard definitions, no version control, and missing validation.

Leave this unfixed and trust bleeds into everything else: budget reports, business cases, equality impact assessments, performance claims. Numbers are the scaffolding of accountability. If the scaffolding is shaky, the whole structure is at risk.

What FHDC must do now

1. Publish a reconciliation statement.
   Explain how 3,475 and 1,646 were produced. Include system names, extraction timestamps, inclusion/exclusion rules (people vs households; suspended/duplicate cases), and why 1 April was “unobtainable” in one reply but provided in another.

2. Adopt one authoritative definition.
   Decide whether you report people, households, or both—and define each. Publish a short data dictionary and attach it to every release.

3. Stamp every number with a data-quality label.
   Show source system, extraction date/time, responsible owner, validation checks, and known limitations. If provisional, say so.

4. Create a single, controlled reporting pipeline.
   Build a version-controlled report for the housing register so FOIs, committee papers, and dashboards all draw from the same reconciled output. Lock access; keep an audit trail.

5. Run a cross-cutting internal audit (report to Audit & Governance next cycle).
   Test controls over key datasets (homelessness, TA, housing register). Publish findings, actions, owners, and deadlines.

6. Correct the public record.
   Where figures are wrong or irreconcilable, issue corrections on the disclosure log and notify requesters directly. Leave a clear audit trail.

7. Name accountable owners.
   Appoint a senior Data Owner for the housing register. Publish their name and role. No accountability, no improvement.

8. Introduce pre-release checks.
   No statistic leaves the council without: (a) definition check; (b) reconciliation against last release; (c) Data Owner sign-off.

9. Train FOI handlers on data literacy.
   Equip staff to spot red flags: definitional drift, unrepeatable extracts, out-of-hours artefacts, mismatched denominators.

10. Publish a quarterly data-quality dashboard.
    Track corrections issued, datasets with known issues, and time-to-fix. If it matters internally, it should be visible externally.

What residents can reasonably expect starting now

• Consistency: same question, same number—or a clear, documented reason why not.

• Clarity: plain-English definitions attached to every figure.

• Traceability: where the number came from, when it was extracted, and who owns it.

• Corrections: prompt, transparent fixes when errors are found.

• Respect: FOI is a democratic right, not a nuisance.

FHDC’s FOI responses are not trustworthy

Right now, FHDC’s FOI responses are not trustworthy. The council cannot have it both ways: either a 1 April snapshot exists, or it doesn’t. Until FHDC reconciles these contradictions, standardises definitions, and locks down its reporting pipeline, every new statistic it releases will carry an unspoken warning: handle with caution as this is information is not true. Public trust like reputational damages isn’t lost overnight—but it can be squandered one contradictory number at a time.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness