Kent County Council Adult Social Care Debt: Nearly £4m Written Off in Five Years as Costs Rise, Arrears Grow and Cases Go to Court

Kent County Council (KCC) has written off £3,919,551 of adult social care debt over the five financial years from April 2020 to April 2025, according to an FOI disclosure reported on 4 September 2025.

That headline figure is politically combustible for a simple reason: adult social care is already the single most pressured part of local government finance. Every pound that cannot be collected is a pound that must be absorbed elsewhere — through service reductions, higher charges, or cuts in other council budgets.

But alongside the “£4m written off” headline sits a second, less visible story: how many people are being charged, how much is being spent overall, how large the overdue caseload is, and how often KCC turns to the courts. A separate KCC FOI response provides those wider data points — and also exposes major gaps in what the public can see.

What Got Written Off – And Why It Matters

The FOI figures cited on the 4 Sept, show write-offs peaking in 2022/23 at about £1.03m, then falling to about £969k in 2023/24 and just over £660k in 2024/25. KCC said the £3.9m written off over five years was “less than 1%” of the total value of charges raised in the same period, and pointed to “strict procedures”, “early intervention with debt”, and a “new finance system” to improve controls.

A former KCC finance chief (quoted in the same report) described write-offs as having “many and varied” causes — from estates that do not cover all liabilities to family disputes and hard-to-realise assets.

The Scale Of The System: Spending Has Surged

The November 2025 FOI response sets out KCC’s spending across three service lines — Residential care, Non-residential care, and Direct Payments — from 2019/20 to 2024/25, plus 2025/26 year-to-date (1 April to 15 September 2025). 

Put simply: Residential care is care provided in a care home or other residential setting (where someone lives on-site); Non-residential care is support delivered in the community (for example, home care visits and other “day-to-day” support without moving into a care home); and Direct Payments are cash payments from the council to an eligible person so they can arrange and pay for their own care rather than having the council arrange it.

Across those categories, the reported total spend rose from £384.7m (2019/20) to £675.0m (2024/25) — an increase of roughly 75% over five years. Residential and non-residential care spending each rose by about 80% over that period, while direct payments rose by about 33%. 

This matters because the debt and write-off debate is happening against a backdrop of rapidly rising overall costs. Even if write-offs are a small percentage, they are occurring within a system where the cash sums are getting bigger every year.

How Many People Are Involved? Two Different “Population” Pictures

The November FOI response includes multiple population counts — and for a lay reader, this is where the paperwork becomes treacherous.

KCC provides:

• “Annual figures (unique people during the financial year)” broken down as chargeable for each service line (with totals ranging from 11,708 in 2019/20 to 16,403 in 2024/25).

• A second set labelled “Baseline populations (annual)” — also described as people receiving a chargeable service — but with much larger totals (around 20,038 in 2019/20 rising to 22,042 in 2024/25). 

KCC also notes: “accounts are not recorded separately.” 

That single sentence is important. It means the council cannot (or at least did not) provide a straightforward count of billing accounts versus people, even though a person can sometimes generate more than one financial relationship over time.

For the public, the bottom line is this: KCC is reporting big numbers of service users, but the datasets are not cleanly aligned into one simple “how many people owe money?” figure.

Arrears: What KCC Can Show – And What It Cannot

On overdue debts, KCC does provide snapshot counts for Residential and Non-residential debts, but not in the format requested.

Instead of reporting “missed instalments”, KCC reports arrears as “overdue debts with a balance above £0”, split into 0–60 days and over 61 days, because it manages delinquencies based on the age of the oldest invoice.

The trend is striking:

• Residential overdue balances aged over 60 days rise from 1,491 (April 2020 snapshot) to 1,849 (April 2025 snapshot).

• Non-residential overdue balances aged over 60 days rise from 1,854 to 2,879 over the same snapshots. 

• A later snapshot (5 August 2025) still shows 2,909 non-residential cases over 60 days. 

But there is a major omission: KCC says it cannot provide arrears information for Direct Payments, because they are “not recorded in the same way”. 

Given that direct payments are a large and growing budget line, this leaves a real blind spot when the public tries to understand the total debt picture.

Court Action: The Five Year “125” Matches The Underlying FoI Counts

The September FOI disclosure revealed 125 court actions were sanctioned to recover unpaid costs — and that KCC declined to disclose the amounts involved, arguing disclosure could prejudice civil proceedings and harm debt collection.

The November 2025 FOI response shows where that “125” comes from: KCC provides annual counts of accounts referred to solicitors for the purpose of obtaining a County Court Judgment, with 32 (2020/21), 43 (2021/22), 16 (2022/23), 13 (2023/24) and 21 (2024/25) — which totals 125 across those five years. 

However, KCC also says these court referral figures are “not split by service type”, and outcomes are not provided in that response. 

The Transparency Problem, Isn’t The Existence Of Debt – It’s The Missing Joins

A council collecting fees and charges for care will always have some non-payment. The public interest question is whether the authority can demonstrate — clearly, consistently, and with proper segmentation — that:

1. it bills correctly,

2. it supports people early when they fall behind, and

3. it escalates proportionately and effectively where appropriate.

Here the FOI responses show significant limitations. KCC states it does not record debt activity in a “recovery ladder” format (reminders, LBAs, referrals, judgments and enforcement stages) and cannot provide those intermediate-stage metrics. 

That makes it hard for residents to tell whether the system is improving — or simply reacting later, at higher cost.

KCC says it is implementing “early intervention” and improved controls via a new finance system. The obvious next step, if the council wants public confidence, is to publish debt metrics that allow independent scrutiny: consistent definitions, service-line segmentation, and outcome reporting — not just write-off totals.

The Shepway Vox Team

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