Half-way through the 2025–26 financial year, the scoreboard at County Hall does not make pretty reading.
Against a net revenue budget of £1.53 billion, Kent County Council is forecasting a £46.5 million overspend – about 3% over budget – as at the end of September (Quarter 2).
In football terms, Kent is going in at half-time two-nil down, with its most expensive defender – Adult Social Care – having an absolute nightmare.
And this is before you factor in a separate £37.2 million overspend on schools’ delegated budgets and a spiralling Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) deficit linked to special educational needs.
This is the stark picture laid out in the Quarter 2 Revenue and Capital Budget Forecast Outturn Report that goes to Cabinet on 19 November 2025, accompanied by a formal Record of Decision asking Cabinet to note the position and agree some budget adjustments.
To understand how serious that is, you have to look back to the February “kick-off”.
What Was Promised At Kick-Off In February
What Was Promised at Kick-Off in February?
On 13 February 2025, under a Conservative administration, Kent County Council approved its 2025/26 budget and Medium Term Financial Plan.Councillors were told:
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There was an estimated £81 million budget gap for 2025–26 that had to be closed through savings, extra income and council tax.
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The budget would be balanced with a 4.989% council tax rise for Kent’s share of the bill (2.995% general increase plus 1.995% for adult social care), taking a Band D charge from £1,610.82 to £1,691.19.
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There would be significant contributions to reserves, including £15.8 million to rebuild general reserves and £36.2 million towards reducing the DSG deficit via the Safety Valve agreement.
The narrative from County Hall at the time was that this was the “right budget for tough times”: a tight, disciplined game plan that would close the gap and rebuild financial resilience. The strategy was to use a mixture of savings, council tax and one-off measures to get reserves back up towards the target of at least 5% of the net revenue budget.
Fast-forward to half-time, and the reality looks very different.
Half Time Reality: Kent 0 – Overspend £46.5m
The Quarter 2 report shows that the current working budget of £1,531.9 million is on course to be overspent by £46.5 million, a 3% overshoot.
Even more worrying, the situation has deteriorated quickly:
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Q1 forecast overspend: £27.9 million
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Q2 forecast overspend: £47.2 million (including schools), of which £46.5 million is on the main General Fund.
The report itself labels the scale of the forecast overspend as “unprecedented” and a critical risk to the council’s financial resilience, demanding “immediate action”.
In football terms, Kent has conceded twice in quick succession, heads have dropped, and the dressing room team talk is sounding more like a crisis meeting.
The Leaky Defence: Adult Social Care In The Spotlight
The single biggest problem is Adult Social Care & Health (ASCH).
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ASCH working budget: £709.2 million
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Forecast outturn: £760.1 million
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Overspend: £50.9 million – a 7.2% overshoot.
Of that £50.9 million:
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£20.9 million is simply savings that were assumed in the budget but are now not expected to be achieved this year.
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The remaining £30 million reflects real-world pressures – more people needing care, staying in care longer, and care packages costing more than planned.
The heaviest hits are in services for older people:
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Older People – Residential Care Services: overspend of £22.4 million, driven by higher-than-budgeted numbers and missed savings.
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Older People – Community-Based Services (e.g. homecare): overspend of £16.3 million due to higher volumes and costs.
Children’s services, while much smaller in percentage terms, are also under pressure:
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Children, Young People & Education (CYPE) has a £2.2 million overspend, largely from more expensive packages for looked-after children, partially offset by underspends in home-to-school transport.
Growth, Environment & Transport (GET) adds a £1.4 million overspend, partly due to rising concessionary bus travel.
The other directorates – Chief Executive’s, Deputy Chief Executive’s, Non-Attributable Costs and corporately held budgets – are collectively underspending by £7.9 million, which helps to soften the blow but nowhere near enough to cancel it out.
In football language: the midfield and attack are doing their best to track back, but the back line is being overrun and the goalkeeper is picking the ball out of the net again and again.
Missed Penalties: Savings Targets Off Track
The February budget was built on a vast savings and income plan.
For 2025–26, Kent set itself a monitored savings and additional income target of £121.5 million. That includes:
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£96.0 million of new savings for 2025–26
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£22.4 million of undelivered savings carried over from the previous year
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plus technical adjustments for grants and one-offs.
At half-time:
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£98 million is expected to be delivered this year – about 81% of the target
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£27.6 million is not expected to be delivered in 2025–26
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£9.2 million is now pushed into future years
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£18.4 million is classed as no longer deliverable
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Only £2.9 million of alternative savings have been identified to plug the gap.
That is the financial equivalent of missing several penalties in a row: the game plan assumed they would go in; now they haven’t, the whole scoreline looks very different.
Worryingly, some of the unachievable savings are in Adult Social Care, where the council had banked on reforms to care pathways, greater use of technology, and “prevention” services reducing demand. The report shows several schemes where expected savings are being scaled back or slipped into future years.
To buy themselves time, the council is leaning on technical manoeuvres such as:
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Flexible use of capital receipts – for example, using £8.021 million of capital receipts to fund revenue costs for the Oracle Cloud system, freeing up the base budget temporarily and deferring some tough savings to 2026–27.
That might feel like cleverly using all the tricks in the playbook, but it doesn’t change the scoreboard. It just postpones part of the problem into the next season.
Reserves: Running Out Of Substitutes
Every overspend has to be funded from reserves – the council’s rainy-day money.
At the start of 2025–26, General Fund reserves stood at £78.5 million. By March 2026, they are now forecast to fall to £41.0 million.
Against a net revenue budget of £1,531.9 million, that £41 million is only about 2.7% of the budget, far below the council’s own aim to hold general reserves of at least 5% – roughly £76.6 million.
Earmarked reserves – money set aside for specific purposes – also shrink from £252.0 million to £244.8 million. Total general plus earmarked reserves drop from £330.5 million to £258.8 million, a fall of £71.7 million in just one year.
On top of that, there is the DSG “shadow deficit”:
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The DSG adjustment account (which holds the schools deficit off the main balance sheet) is forecast to grow from £133.7 million to £169.6 million in 2025–26.
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Because £36.2 million of related Safety Valve money is held in a separate reserve, the report describes the “true DSG deficit” as £133.4 million.
The statutory override which allows councils to park DSG deficits off the main books runs only until 2027–28. After that, any remaining shortfall has to be met from general reserves – the same general reserves that are already forecast to shrink to nearly half of the council’s own minimum target.
In football terms, the bench is almost empty. There are fewer and fewer substitutes left to bring on if another player goes down injured.
Schools And Special Needs: A Second Match On The Side Pitch
The Quarter 2 report makes clear that schools and special educational needs are playing their own, even more brutal fixture.
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The 2025–26 DSG totals £1,976.7 billion and is forecast to overspend by £64.7 million, almost entirely driven by the High Needs Block, which is £65.9 million over budget.
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Schools’ delegated budgets are forecast to overspend by £37.2 million, reflecting surging demand for special educational needs support and specialist placements.
Kent is in the Department for Education’s Safety Valve Programme, which will provide £140 million by 2027–28, while the council itself must contribute over £80 million to clear part of the deficit. In 2025–26 alone, Kent receives £14.6 million from the DfE and contributes £14.2 million itself.
But with the DSG deficit still rising, Kent is running hard just to stand still; the Safety Valve deal only works if the council can genuinely bring future demand and costs under control.
It is like being awarded a series of free kicks on the edge of the box – helpful, yes, but the defence is still completely exposed.
Capital Programme: Stadium Rebuild Delayed
The General Fund capital programme for 2025–26, including roll-forwards, is £365.6 million. By the end of September, the council had spent £112.1 million, around 30.7% of the budget.
A £35.4 million underspend is forecast on the capital programme:
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£26.2 million “real” variance, of which £20 million is additional funding not yet in the budget
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£61.6 million “rephasing” – slippage where schemes are delayed into future years, including major ICT projects such as the Oracle Cloud implementation and other infrastructure schemes.
Capital slippage can be perfectly sensible – major projects are complex, and delays happen. But it also means that improvements residents were led to expect this year – whether in roads, schools or IT – are being pushed further down the calendar.
Think of it as the club announcing a big stadium rebuild, only for the diggers to arrive a season late.
New Manager, Same Injury List: Enter Reform UK
Since the May 2025 local elections, Kent has been run by Reform UK, with council leader Linden Kemkaran and colleagues promising to showcase a new, efficiency-driven approach.
National coverage has already reported that:
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Reform in Kent claims to have cut council debt by around £66 million and adopted a “no more borrowing” stance, alongside scrapping net zero renewable energy schemes to save money.
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Despite campaign rhetoric about cutting waste, the cabinet member for adult social care has acknowledged services are already “down to the bare bones” and signalled that a 5% council tax rise – the maximum allowed – is likely next year to plug a £50 million shortfall.
In other words, the new manager has changed the formation, declared there will be no more flashy signings on credit, and cancelled some high-profile projects – but the squad is still thin, the injury list is growing, and the league rules still insist the books must balance.
Crucially, many of the problems showing up at Quarter 2 – particularly in adult social care and DSG – were already baked into the Conservative-era budget agreed in February, which assumed very ambitious savings and a swift rebuild of reserves.
Reform inherited that match plan. But six months into the season, it is now their squad, their tactics and their substitutions on the touchline.
The No Non-Essential Spend Team Talk
Faced with what it explicitly calls an “unprecedented” overspend, the Quarter 2 report sets out a list of urgent actions to try to turn the game around:
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A “no non-essential spend” message to all staff – anything not legally required must be justified by reference to the specific law that demands it.
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Reminding budget managers that they must at least stay within budget and “make all efforts to underspend” for the rest of the year.
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A panel to scrutinise any increase in forecasts between October and November, effectively putting managers under tighter match-day review.
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A recruitment review, limiting new posts to those needed to deliver statutory duties.
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In adult social care, a vacancy control panel, a tougher approach to reviews of care packages to ensure they remain “proportionate”, and efforts to reduce use of expensive short-term beds and rely more on framework providers and technology.
It is the fiscal equivalent of shouting in the dressing room: keep your shape, stop taking unnecessary risks, no more fancy tricks on the ball, everyone tracks back.
A Yes “Suck It Up” Leader Moment In The Directors’ Box
You can almost imagine the scene in a County Hall hospitality box.
Linden Kemkaran: “So, Amanda, how bad is it if we’re overspending by three percent?”
Chief Exec Amanda Beer: “Well, Linden, a mere three percent is, in practice, the difference between a prudently balanced budget and a financially destabilising trajectory that might, in the fullness of time, necessitate certain statutory notifications.”
Deputy Chief Exec Ben Watts: “I think that means if it carries on like this, we could eventually need a section 114, Linden.”
Behind the dry language, that is the real worry. If Kent cannot bring its spending back under control, its reserves will be dangerously low just as the DSG override expires and further social care pressures hit. At some point, every finance director has to consider the nuclear option: a formal notice that the council can no longer balance its budget.
Kent is not there yet – but the Quarter 2 report reads like an early warning from the dug-out.
What It Means For Residents: Extra Time And Tough Tackles Ahead
For residents, the numbers translate into three likely trends:
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Council tax pressure
With both Conservatives and now Reform concluding that savings alone will not close the gap, a near-maximum rise in council tax for 2026–27 looks highly likely, mirroring the 4.989% increase agreed for 2025–26 and the 5% now openly discussed by the Reform leadership. -
Service cuts and retrenchment
The “no non-essential spend” regime, combined with slippage in the capital programme and ongoing decisions like the proposed closure of youth provision in deprived communities, points towards further thinning out of local services beyond the statutory minimum. -
Rising risk in social care and special needs
Overspends in adult social care and high-needs education are not just numbers; they are the result of real people needing support. Tightening criteria, trimming packages and cutting preventive services may reduce costs in the short term but risk higher bills – and worse outcomes – later.
Full-Time Whistle Still A Long Way Off
Quarter 2 is only half-time in the financial year. A lot can change between now and March. The council could yet claw back some of the overspend, particularly if the “no non-essential spend” message bites and if some savings begin to land.
But the trajectory is plain:
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A February budget that claimed to plug an £81 million gap, rebuild reserves and keep Kent on a stable footing.
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A half-time picture of £46.5 million overspend, reserves sliding towards 2.7% of the budget and a DSG deficit still rising.
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A new administration that promised to cut waste and borrowing now openly preparing residents for further council tax hikes and “bare bones” services.
If Kent’s finances were a football match, the fans would be nervously glancing at the clock, wondering whether their team can salvage a draw – or whether they are watching the early stages of a relegation battle.
Either way, the Quarter 2 report makes one thing clear: when the teams come out for the second half there is no margin for more missed chances, and many Kent residents may feel like chanting “you’re not fit to wear the shirt” at those in the Reform UK Cabinet Team.
The Shepway Vox Team
Dissent is NOT a Crime
