Why Folkestone & Hythe Backed the East Kent Unitary ‘Option 3A’ – Democracy, Devolution and the District’s Future Explained

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has formally backed the creation of a large East Kent unitary authority – and its cabinet endorsed that position unanimously within minutes – after a long, reluctant and at times emotional debate on local government reorganisation (LGR).

At an extraordinary council meeting on Wednesday, councillors voted overwhelmingly to support “Option 3A”: a three-unitary model for Kent which would merge Folkestone & Hythe with Dover, Ashford, Canterbury and Thanet.

The recorded vote was:

• 22 councillors for 3A

• 1 for 1A (a single Kent-wide unitary)

• 1 for 4D (four unitaries, splitting the district)

• 1 for 5A (five smaller unitaries)

• 1 abstention

Immediately afterwards, the cabinet met in the same room. Cabinet member Councillor McConville opened the first substantive item by thanking all members for their contributions in the earlier debate and noted the “overwhelming support” for 3A in the full council.

He then moved adoption of the recommendations, explicitly proposing that recommendation three name 3A as the council’s preferred option and authorise officers to make the formal submission. The Leader promptly reiterated his thanks, formally seconded 3A “as the selected choice of this council” and invited any final comments.

None were offered. With “brevity” the agreed watchword after a lengthy afternoon, cabinet members raised their hands as one. The Leader declared the decision unanimous, remarked that “you can’t say fairer than that”, and closed the meeting – and the council’s role in this phase of LGR – in a matter of minutes.

“None Of Us Asked For This”

Cabinet’s swift sign-off contrasted with the more drawn-out and conflicted discussion in the preceding council session.

Council leader Jim Martin had opened that earlier meeting with an apology and a promise. Although formal legal advice framed councillors as being “consulted”, he insisted he was “determined to follow the views of this Council” and would be “extraordinarily surprised” if cabinet did anything other than reflect the chamber’s decision. He also requested a recorded vote from the outset, saying such a complex and contentious issue demanded complete transparency.

If there was one unifying theme in the debate, it was that almost nobody in the room actually wanted LGR at all.

“This isn’t something we asked for,” said one councillor. “It’s being done to us.” Others called the whole exercise “the best of a bad job” or simply “the least worst case”.

Labour Councillor Jackie Mead stressed that her group had a free vote – “we’ve not been whipped” – and many members across parties said they were voting with “heavy hearts”.

Councillor Holgate launched one of the sharpest attacks on the government’s handling of reform. LGR was being marketed as “devolution”, he said, but had arrived as “a statutory instruction, a fixed timeline, a fixed population threshold” funded almost entirely from councils’ own budgets.

KFOG – the Kent Finance Officers’ Group – was now explicit that LGR “does not solve the funding crisis”, he warned. What was being proposed might “look neater on paper”, but it did not address the real pressures in social care and other local services.

Several councillors criticised the timetable as “hurried” and “ill-thought-out”. Connor argued that, with more time, Kent could have explored more imaginative boundary changes and properly re-drawn the map rather than being “pressed up against it” with just days to firm up a view.

Democracy: Fewer Councillors, Larger Patches

Across the chamber, there was deep unease about the democratic consequences of reorganisation, whichever option ministers eventually choose.

Councillor Thomas described LGR as “a death knell for independent councillors” and for younger people trying to balance work, family and public service. Cllr Holgate, a relatively new councillor with two children under three and a full-time job, told colleagues the change would probably end his own local government career.

Councillor Alan Martin warned that every model on the table increased the ratio of residents to councillors, sometimes dramatically. Modern customer services could handle some casework, he accepted, but he worried about “a void between residents and the unitary structure” and the heavy reliance that would fall on town and parish councils to bridge that gap.

Several predicted the rise of the full-time professional politician. “I can’t see… that people can actually manage the workloads they will be expected to,” said Councillor Hollingsbee, suggesting only those able to treat it as a job would be able to cope. Others noted, pointedly, that the LGR debate itself had been scheduled for 4pm – a time that made attendance difficult for councillors in full-time work.

Against that backdrop, members judged the options partly on how far they stretched local representation. Four- and five-unitary models were widely viewed as financially weak, while the single county-wide option 1A was seen as too remote and fundamentally at odds with the stated aim of devolving power.

East Kent Identity vs Splitting The District

A central question in the debate was where Folkestone & Hythe “belongs” – and whether the district should be kept together at all.

Councillor Lockwood was the most prominent supporter of option 4D, which would split the district north–south into two separate unitaries. He argued that four authorities of under 400,000 people offered a fairer distribution of population and wealth and were “closest to what the government’s asking for”. Crucially, he said 4D was the only model that seriously revisited the 1974 boundaries and tried to correct historic mistakes.

But others regarded slicing Folkestone & Hythe in two as a red line.

Councillor Mead, who said she had looked at the proposals “from a people-centric point of view”, rejected 4D outright.

“We’ve been together for such a long time,” she said of Folkestone and Hythe. “We support each other, our residents go back and forth, our children share schools. If we were to cut that, I think it would do irreparable damage to some of our communities.”

She also questioned how two different unitaries would coordinate during disruption on the M20 or at Dover, warning of “Operation Brock being managed by two councils who don’t agree with each other.”

In his summing up, Martin highlighted a very specific local risk of 4D: Otterpool Park. Folkestone taxpayers, he argued, had invested in the major new garden town on the understanding that future returns would flow back into this community.

“If we go into different unitaries, there is zero chance that there would be a return from Otterpool to the people of Folkestone,” he said.

By contrast, several councillors painted a picture of East Kent as a coherent unit – historically, culturally and economically – that made 3A feel more natural to residents.

Councillor Fuller took colleagues on a whistle-stop tour of institutions whose footprints mirror the proposed East Kent authority: the hospitals at Canterbury, Ashford, Dover, Margate and Folkestone; the East Kent policing area; the East Kent College campuses; coastal castles, Martello towers and the Royal Military Canal; HS1 stations and cross-Channel infrastructure at Folkestone and Dover.

“The vast majority of structures around education, health, transport and even tourism all fit together well in East Kent,” he said, dubbing 3A the “KFC option” in his extended analogy – the one that obviously matches what central government is hinting it wants.

Councillor Scoffham went even further back in history, recalling his own booklet on “The Romans in East Kent”. Canterbury, he said, had long been the “hub of the wheel”, with ports at Richborough, Dover, Lympne and elsewhere forming a historic East Kent system.

“There’s a unity in East Kent, there’s an identity in East Kent, there’s a geographical entity, there’s a historical dimension and then the economic one,” he argued. For him, 3A was the “least worst option” that best matched that reality.

Economics, Risk And The Spectre Of Social Care

Alongside identity and democracy, money weighed heavily in the discussion.

Several councillors referred to KPMG’s analysis of the different business cases, which suggests some models would never pay back their set-up costs and others would only do so slowly. On that basis, four- and five-unitary options were widely dismissed.

“Any of the four and five unitary proposals simply don’t work economically,” said Alan Martin. Interestingly, he noted that the Kent County Council proposal, 1A, was “the absolute winner” on pure efficiency and risk-pooling grounds – particularly for high-cost services like social care. But because it contradicted the stated aims of LGR and blocked meaningful devolution, he concluded that 3A struck the best available balance between democratic access and long-term viability.

Councillor Prater, drawing on advice from the leader of the new Somerset unitary, framed the entire exercise as only worthwhile if it unlocks real devolution.

“Local government reorganisation on its own is pointless,” he told the chamber. “The only prize is the devolution of money and decisions affecting Kent currently being made in Westminster.”

On that test, he said, 1A failed completely because a single authority could not form the basis for a devolved settlement with government.

He also warned that the timetable to implement new unitaries by May 2028 left no realistic scope for wholesale boundary rewriting or complex staff and contract disaggregation. A model like 4D, he argued, “seeks to do too much” in the time available.

From a risk perspective, several members stressed the importance of spreading the burden of social care across a sufficiently large tax base. Cllr Mead pointed to low average wages and high levels of need in coastal communities such as Folkestone, stressing that a larger East Kent authority might be better placed to fund adult social care and support vulnerable residents.

At county level, Reform UK councillor and KCC member David Wimble was the most vocal supporter of the single-unitary 1A, citing economies of scale in services such as fostering, fire and rescue and waste disposal.

“I’m going to go for 1A for the economic reasons,” he said, warning that fragmentation risked driving up costs dramatically and predicting council tax could “double within five years”. However, acknowledging that the meeting was unlikely to back that path, he described 3A as “the next best deal from a county point of view” and pledged to support it if 1A failed.

A Reluctant Consensus – And A Rapid Rubber-Stamp

Despite a handful of dissenting voices and one abstention, momentum behind 3A built steadily through the afternoon. Some, like Councillors Thomas, Blakemore and Holgate, backed it explicitly as “the least worst case”. Others, like Mead, McConville and Wing, said they disliked every option but felt 3A was the only realistic way to protect residents’ interests within the tight timetable.

Several pointed to the professional advice before them. Figure 20 of the options appraisal, Councillor Thomas noted, gave 3A the highest overall assessment when measured against the government’s evaluation criteria. Officers had also confirmed that key partners – including Kent Police, Kent Fire & Rescue and the NHS – favoured 3A because it aligned with their existing operational geographies.

In his closing comments to council, Martin tried to pivot from reluctant acceptance to cautious optimism. Rehearsing his own journey through the options, he reiterated that 1A did not support devolution, that 4B severed Folkestone & Hythe from Dover, and that 4D fatally undermined Otterpool’s promise to local taxpayers. Unitary 5A, he said, had always been more about “the politics of North Kent” than the realities of the south and east.

By contrast, he argued, 3A offered the best long-term opportunity if councillors could secure a fair funding deal and harness the district’s position as the “gateway to Europe”.

“Within a 200-mile radius across the Channel you’ve got 60 million people,” he said. “We have got a golden opportunity in terms of the Channel Tunnel and Dover. Our two growth industries in our district are adult social care and tourism, and we can tap into 60 million people to come and see what we have to offer in this fantastic place that we call home.”

Minutes later, in the much shorter cabinet session, that argument was translated into a formal decision. With no dissent and no amendments, cabinet confirmed 3A as Folkestone & Hythe’s official preference and authorised officers to send that message on to Whitehall.

The final shape of local government in Kent will now be decided by ministers in Centrasl Government – but Folkestone & Hythe has made its view unmistakably clear.

The Shepway Vox Team

Not Owned By Hedgefunds Or Barons