Most Kent Councils Off Track for 2030 Net Zero

Kent’s local councils are under growing scrutiny for how they tackle climate change. Nearly all of them declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, pledging to cut emissions – yet progress has been mixed. New Council Climate Action Scorecards released in June 2025 allow us to compare each Kent council’s climate efforts in 2025 versus 2023. The results show some councils in Kent stepping up their climate action, while others have stalled or even backtracked. Below, we break down how Kent’s councils have fared, what actions they’ve taken (or not taken), and the political winds influencing their climate commitments.

The Scorecard: How Kent Councils Measure Up

In 2025, Climate Emergency UK assessed every UK council on a wide range of climate actions – from home retrofitting and green transport to tree planting and recycling – and gave each a percentage score. For Kent’s councils, the average score in 2025 was around 35%, a bit below the UK-wide average of 38%. This means Kent’s councils, on average, are doing just over one-third of the recommended actions towards net zero. The good news is every Kent council improved at least slightly since the first scorecard in 2023. However, the gains are modest – roughly a 4-5 point increase on average, in line with the national trend of slow progress (the UK average rose only 6 points). In other words, most councils are still far from doing even half of what’s needed by 2030.

At the top end, Maidstone Borough Council now has the highest climate action score in Kent at 45% (up from 35% in 2023). Several others cluster in the high 30s to 40% range, including Tunbridge Wells (40%), Dover (40%), Medway (40%), and Canterbury (39%) – with Canterbury achieving one of the biggest jumps (+13 points since 2023). By contrast, the lowest performers are Sevenoaks District Council at just 23% and Ashford Borough Council at 25%, both essentially flat or slightly worse than two years ago. (Sevenoaks’ 23% score is among the lowest of any district council in South East England.) Kent County Council itself scored around 31-32%, barely inching up by 1 point – a result now overshadowed by a dramatic political U-turn (more on that later).

Overall, only Maidstone managed to score above 40%, and none of Kent’s councils are above 50%, which echoes the national picture: only 62 of 391 UK councils scored over 50%. In fact, several Kent authorities are still under 30%. These scores suggest that despite bold promises, most Kent councils are not yet doing even half of the actions that experts say they should, to cut carbon and protect their communities. The slow progress “indicates that most UK councils are not doing half of the actions assessed… to improve their community and adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change,” Climate Emergency UK warned in its release. Kent is no exception – though some councils are certainly trying harder than others.

Leaders: Maidstone and Canterbury Stepping Up

Several Kent councils have distinguished themselves by significantly improving their climate action or scoring relatively well compared to their peers. Maidstone Borough Council stands out as an early leader. It was one of the first in Kent to declare a climate emergency (back in April 2019), and it adopted a comprehensive Biodiversity and Climate Change Action Plan soon after. That plan earned Maidstone a 72% rating in a 2022 audit of climate action plans – top in Kent and among the best nationally. Crucially, Maidstone’s focus has shifted from planning to doing. By 2025, Maidstone’s overall action score rose to 45%, making it the highest scoring council in Kent. The council excelled in areas like greening its buildings and heating (scoring 68% in that category, one of the highest marks in the region).

Maidstone’s leadership stresses that there’s no room for complacency. “It’s fantastic for Maidstone to be recognised as a top performing council when it comes to climate change strategy. However, this is just the beginning, and actions speak louder than words – there is so much we can do to address this issue and we’re committed to doing it,” said Cllr. David Burton, Maidstone’s leader, when the council’s plan was first singled out for praise. He welcomed the scorecards not as a victory lap but as motivation for all Kent authorities to “work together” on climate action. “We don’t see [the] scorecard as a competition… We hope that more local authorities will be encouraged to take part and work together. Our combined efforts can really help to tackle this problem,” Cllr. Burton said. That spirit of collaboration will be crucial if Kent is to accelerate its climate progress beyond the current slow crawl.

Another bright spot is Canterbury City Council, which achieved the largest improvement of any Kent authority: a jump of +13 points, bringing it to 39%. Canterbury did declare a climate emergency in 2019, committing the council to net-zero by 2030, but for a while progress was uneven. Now, Canterbury appears to be refocusing and updating its plans. In mid-2025 the council drafted a new Net Zero Action Plan to replace its earlier 2021 strategy, acknowledging that “an enormous amount has changed over the past four years” and recommitting to urgent emissions cuts. “We are committed to playing our role in tackling the climate emergency… by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as we can,” the council’s draft plan declares. The new plan is meant to “focus the council’s efforts and resources to build a legacy” on climate action, even with potential local government reorganisation on the horizon. In practice, Canterbury’s higher score this year suggests it has made tangible strides – for example, improving home energy efficiency and embedding climate goals into its operations – and it aims to keep that momentum.

Other councils showing solid gains include Maidstone’s neighbor Tunbridge Wells (+3 to 40%), Dartford (+7 to 37%), and a cluster of districts – Swale, Thanet, and Tonbridge & Malling – each improving around 7 points to the low-30s. These improvements often reflect specific initiatives: Dartford and Thanet, for instance, both ramped up programs for electric vehicle chargers and tree planting, contributing to their score rises. Even Gravesham (+4 to 36%) and Folkestone & Hythe (+2 to 34%) inched forward with new climate action plan updates and community engagement on climate issues. The overall message is positive: every Kent council (bar one, as we’ll see) is doing more in 2025 than it was two years ago. But some started so far behind that even after improving, they remain in the lower tiers nationally. As Climate Emergency UK notes, many councils’ actions still fall well short of what’s needed to meet their 2030 targets.

Laggards: Ashford & Sevenoaks Struggle To Act

If Maidstone and Canterbury are leading the charge, Ashford and Sevenoaks are at the other end of the spectrum, struggling to translate promises into action. Tellingly, these were the only two councils in Kent that initially refused to declare a climate emergency in 2019. Both are largely Conservative-run and opted for alternate wording or strategies instead of the symbolic “emergency” declaration – and both now have the lowest climate action scores in the county.

Campaigners from Extinction Rebellion Ashford urging the council to declare a climate emergency in July 2019. The motion was voted down, though the council did set a net-zero 2030 goal. Ashford’s climate action score in 2025 remains low, suggesting that bold targets were not matched by sufficient delivery.

In Ashford, a motion to declare a climate emergency was narrowly voted down in July 2019 – despite passionate pleas from newly elected Green councillor Steve Campkin and local climate activists who packed the council meeting. The Conservative majority argued that the term “emergency” was too alarmist. Instead, Council Leader Gerry Clarkson proposed a counter-motion focusing on concrete targets. “I am against declaring it a climate emergency,” Cllr. Clarkson said at the time, “not because I don’t think it is important but I would like to pass a motion that actually sharpens up delivery”. And indeed, the council formally committed to make the Borough of Ashford carbon neutral by 2030, with an ambitious interim goal of cutting 80% of emissions by 2025. “We are saying our town is going to be carbon neutral by 2030 and to be the first to get to 80% by 2025,” Clarkson declared in 2019.

Those goals – 80% by 2025, 100% by 2030 – were extraordinarily bold on paper. But fast forward to 2025, and Ashford’s scorecard suggests the council has fallen far short. Ashford managed only a 25% climate action score, down slightly (-1) from its 2023 result. This implies that many of the promised actions did not fully materialize. For instance, Ashford did roll out an “Ashford to Zero” climate strategy in 2021 and assessed its own carbon footprint, but implementation has lagged. The 2025 scorecard shows Ashford scoring just 7% in the Planning & Land Use category (perhaps reflecting little progress on eco-friendly planning policies) and 0% in Biodiversity actions【. The bright spot is some improvement in Transport (+19 points) – likely credit for installing a few electric vehicle chargers or promoting cycling – yet Ashford still scored only 27% in that area. In short, Ashford set big climate targets but didn’t back them with enough concrete action, highlighting the risk of treating climate commitments as a checkbox. As Cllr. Clarkson said, it’s about sharpening delivery – and the delivery hasn’t kept up with the promise so far.

Sevenoaks District Council took a similar approach. It never did declare a climate emergency (the council formally voted against doing so), but it too announced a plan to achieve net zero by 2030 for its own operations. Early on, Sevenoaks did make some progress – it formulated a “Net Zero 2030” roadmap and ticked off some actions through 2021-22. However, by 2024 the council openly acknowledged that its 2030 net-zero aspiration was “no longer realistic” without greater resources. The 2025 scorecard result reflects this stagnation: Sevenoaks scored only 23%, actually dropping a point since 2023. It is among the bottom three district councils in the entire South East (only Adur and Spelthorne are similarly low). Notably, Sevenoaks scored 0% in the Waste & Recycling category and just 24% in Community Engagement, indicating very little progress on those fronts. The council did do better in Buildings & Heating (36%), likely from improving energy efficiency in some council facilities. But overall, Sevenoaks’ climate actions appear patchy and insufficient. A petition by residents urging Sevenoaks to finally declare a Climate and Nature Emergency gained traction last year, reflecting public frustration. For now, however, Sevenoaks’ approach remains more muted than most of its neighbors – and its low score shows the cost of that caution.

Between them, Ashford and Sevenoaks illustrate that strong wording alone (“climate emergency”) isn’t enough – but neither is avoiding the language while claiming to act. In Ashford’s case, councillors rejected symbolic language in favor of measurable targets, but those targets proved overly optimistic. In Sevenoaks, the council tried to quietly implement a climate plan without the fanfare of an emergency declaration, only to find itself unable to meet its goals on the original timeline. These two districts now have the unenviable task of catching up after years of slow progress. As one climate petition put it bluntly: “Under the current Net Zero Plan, Sevenoaks Council is unlikely to reach net zero by 2030. The people of Sevenoaks want us to act decisively on climate change”. That sentiment could apply just as well to Ashford.

Mixed Fortunes & Local Highlights

It’s worth noting that most other Kent councils fall somewhere in the middle – not leading the pack, but not completely lagging either. Swale Borough Council is an interesting case. Swale declared a “climate and ecological emergency” in 2019 with extremely ambitious targets: net zero for the council by 2025, and for the whole borough by 2030. By early 2024, it became clear Swale would miss its 2025 council net-zero goal. “Swale has set some of the most ambitious targets nationally. However, it has become apparent that we will not reach the aspirational 2025 council target, although we are moving in the right direction,” a council report admitted. The council cited external factors and lack of funding for falling short. Nonetheless, Swale has taken notable actions: solar panels on council facilities, retrofitting offices, introducing EV car share schemes, planting over 14,000 trees, and switching the council fleet to electric.

Swale’s Green Party environment committee chair, Cllr. Rich Lehmann, urged that the progress made is still significant. “Although we have not met our aspirational, self-imposed target, we have achieved an incredible amount with our available resources, and should be proud of the progress we have made,” he said, praising council staff for working “incredibly hard”. He also appealed to the public to do their part: “We will continue to work hard to tackle these issues, but also need the support of the community – whether recycling more, taking public transport or walking where possible, or even something as simple as switching to LED lighting at home. If we work together, we can continue our progress towards our net zero goals.”. Swale’s scorecard in 2025 rose to 30% (up 7 points), reflecting some of these efforts. Yet as an opposition councillor, Cllr. Julien Speed, pointed out, there’s “a long way to go” and some initiatives haven’t reached across the whole district (for example, the car-sharing scheme is only in two towns). Swale’s experience captures the challenge many councils face: enthusiastic goals and some early wins, followed by the realization that deeper decarbonization is very hard without more money and broader buy-in.

Other districts like Dover (40%), Gravesham (36%), Thanet (37%), and Tonbridge & Malling (33%) have each taken a few positive steps – such as Dover improving home insulation programs, or Thanet enhancing community engagement – but also have gaps. For instance, Thanet actually saw its Transport score drop and even showed a negative percentage in one transport metric (possibly due to approving a road scheme, which incurs a penalty in the scoring). Medway Council – a unitary authority covering the Medway towns – scored 40%, about average, with strong performance in waste/recycling (73%) but very low in transport (0% on sustainable transport initiatives). Medway did declare a climate emergency in 2019 and has a detailed action plan, but its minimal improvement (+1 point) indicates it too is struggling to implement major changes beyond its successful recycling programs.

In summary, most Kent councils have made incremental progress – updating climate strategies, starting to retrofit buildings, planting trees, collaborating with community groups – but few have yet implemented transformative changes on transport, planning, or large-scale home energy retrofits. Those latter areas are where scores are often poorest (transport scores across Kent’s county and districts were especially low, often under 20%). Climate Emergency UK’s methodology gives significant weight to these difficult sectors, so Kent councils will need to tackle them more aggressively to raise their scores and, more importantly, cut emissions.

Kent County Council: Climate U-Turn At The Top

No discussion of Kent and climate action can ignore the dramatic reversal by Kent County Council (KCC) – the upper-tier authority that coordinates many services across the county. KCC had declared a climate emergency in May 2019, with broad cross-party support at the time. But in 2025, following local elections that gave Reform UK a majority at County Hall, KCC became one of the very first councils in the UK to rescind its climate emergency declaration. This move, made official in a vote on 19 September 2025, has drawn national attention and local controversy.

The Reform UK administration at KCC argued that the 2019 emergency declaration was alarmist and stifling debate. The motion they passed claims the declaration “endorsed the unproven view of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change”, dismisses climate concerns as “misinformation”, and asserts that pursuing net zero was a “mistake” that put financial burdens on taxpayers. In place of the climate emergency and the council’s previous Net Zero 2030 goal, KCC’s new leadership says it will adopt a scaled-back “Energy and Low Emissions Strategy” focusing on cost savings and “direct benefits to Kent residents”. For example, KCC’s leader, Cllr. Linden Kemkaran (Reform), has touted cancelling plans to retrofit council buildings and to convert the vehicle fleet to electric – moves she claims will save tens of millions of pounds. The council also signaled support for things like exploring a new nuclear reactor at Dungeness and focusing on flood drainage, while dropping the explicit goal of net zero by 2030.

This wholesale rollback of KCC’s climate commitment has been condemned by many local opposition figures and experts. “Kent cannot afford policy built on misinformation; in a warming, low-lying county, truth isn’t a debating point – it’s the difference between prudent governance and avoidable harm,” wrote the independent Shepway Vox news team, after dissecting the Reform group’s background paper and finding it riddled with false claims (from misstatements about CO2 and extreme weather to debunked talking points about polar bears). Polly Billington, MP for East Thanet, blasted the council’s new stance as an “endorsement of anti-science organisations and conspiracy theories.” In a public letter to the KCC leader, she said the motion “contains a large number of unevidenced, false or misleading claims about climate science, carbon dioxide, and even polar bears.” Her concern was that Kent’s leadership was now sending a dangerous message that rejects established science. Even before the vote, climate protesters gathered outside County Hall in Maidstone and clashed with a smaller group of climate skeptics, reflecting how polarising the issue had become.

Inside the council, opposition councillors painted the Reform-led decision as a grave mistake. “Kent is at the forefront of climate impacts. We are severely water stressed, we will suffer most from summer heatwaves, [and] sea level rises will devastate communities… This is most definitely an emergency,” argued Cllr. Stuart Jeffery (Green Party) during the debate, highlighting the very real local risks from climate change. He noted that a KCC report projected Kent could see 6°C of warming and 80cm of sea level rise in future decades, impacts that “will kill many, many people and destroy communities” if ignored. Cllr. Antony Hook, leader of the Liberal Democrat group at KCC, decried the decision as an “act of political vandalism” after a summer of droughts and heat records in Kent. “They call sensible, evidence-based plans ‘expensive virtue-signalling’, but the reality is they are the ones peddling a dangerous and costly fantasy,” Hook said of the Reform majority, “Their approach would leave our residents with higher energy bills, our communities more vulnerable to flooding, and our local economy lagging behind in the green jobs revolution.” These strong words underline a fear that KCC’s rollback could set the whole county back at the very moment when more action is needed, not less.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (left) sits with KCC Leader Cllr. Linden Kemkaran. The Reform party gained control of Kent County Council in 2025 and controversially scrapped the council’s climate emergency declaration. The move was condemned by Green and Lib Dem councillors as “dangerous” in a county highly vulnerable to climate change.

One might ask: how did this affect KCC’s own climate action score? The irony is that Kent County Council’s score was already low – 32% in 2025 – and barely improved from 2023. The scorecard shows KCC performing especially poorly on Transport (only 9%) and Planning (0%), while middling on things like Waste & Recycling (42%, after some improvement). These scores were assessed before the Reform administration took over (the data collection was mostly in 2024), so they reflect the previous council’s actions. Even then, KCC was behind other counties – the South East Climate Alliance noted Surrey County Council scored 40% and even West Sussex (which also had a Reform surge) scored 33%, whereas Kent managed only 31% – the lowest of the South East counties. In short, KCC had a lot of room for improvement. Now, with the climate emergency declaration scrapped and a shift in focus, there’s concern that KCC’s future climate efforts could stall or reverse, leaving critical projects (like home insulation schemes or renewable energy investments) without political support.

It remains to be seen whether KCC’s new approach will trickle down to influence the district councils. Many of those districts, as we’ve seen, are still pushing forward with their own climate plans and may fill some gaps left by the county. For example, while KCC has stepped back from climate leadership, districts like Dover and Folkestone & Hythe have been working on coastal flood resilience and renewable energy projects in their communities, and Medway is continuing its climate program. There is also talk of stronger collaboration among the districts – essentially a bottom-up network – to share best practices on climate, independently of the county council’s stance.

Where Does Kent Go From Here

The picture of climate action in Kent is a patchwork. Some councils (like Maidstone, Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells) are gradually raising their game, demonstrating that local authorities can make progress with dedicated plans, community engagement, and political will. Others are treading water or struggling to get out of the starting blocks. And at the county level, politics has introduced a sharp about-face that could imperil broader regional initiatives (for instance, KCC previously coordinated the Kent & Medway Energy and Low Emissions Strategy, a countywide plan to cut emissions – its fate is now uncertain).

For Kent’s residents, the implications are tangible. If councils accelerate climate action, the benefits include lower energy bills (through home insulation programs), new green jobs, better public transport, improved air quality, and greater resilience to floods and heatwaves. If action stalls, the county faces mounting risks – something even KCC’s own scientists and reports have emphasized. Kent’s unique geography as a “warming, low-lying county” means it is “at the forefront of climate impacts”, as Cllr. Jeffery warned. This summer’s droughts and wildfires, and recent flooding in parts of Kent, have driven that message home.

Ultimately, the scorecards are a tool for accountability. They allow citizens to ask their councils: we declared a climate emergency – what are we actually doing about it? In Kent, that accountability is more important than ever. The 2025 data shows modest improvements, but also flags that the current pace is far too slow to meet 2030 targets. Climate Emergency UK explicitly calls for central government to help, by making climate action a “fully-funded legal duty” for councils and giving them more powers. That could certainly boost Kent’s efforts, especially for smaller districts with tight budgets.

In the meantime, Kent’s councils will likely continue on divergent paths. Some will press ahead with local climate initiatives, regardless of the noise at County Hall. Others may scale back if local leadership changes or if they feel squeezed financially. For the people of Kent – from the coastal communities eyeing rising seas, to farmers worrying about water shortages, to young activists demanding a livable future – the hope is that facts and forward-thinking ultimately win out over cynicism and denial. As the saga at KCC shows, politics can dramatically alter climate priorities overnight. But as the scorecards remind us, it’s the day-to-day, year-to-year work on the ground that really counts. Every solar panel installed, every tree planted, every bus route improved, every home insulated – those are the building blocks of climate action that Kent (and every county) will need to greatly expand in the coming years.

Kent’s story so far is a cautionary tale with a few silver linings. The challenge now is to learn from both the successes and the setbacks – and ensure that by the time the next scorecard comes around, our councils have a much stronger report card to show the public. The climate is undeniably changing; the question is whether Kent’s local leaders will change fast enough in response, putting aside politics to safeguard the county’s future. The pressure from residents and the spotlight of initiatives like the scorecards may yet push more councils in the right direction, turning Kent from a climate battleground into a showcase of local climate action. For now, though, the county remains a microcosm of the UK as a whole: pockets of real progress, a few steps back, and an urgent need to pick up the pace.

The Shepway Vox Team

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