For more than a decade, procurement cards have been sold to the public as a simple idea: a controlled payment card for low-value goods and services, intended to cut paperwork and reduce invoice processing. In principle, it’s the administrative equivalent of swapping a queue at the cash desk for a faster checkout lane.
In practice, procurement cards do something else as well: they concentrate purchasing power, hide micro-decisions in plain sight, and—if publication is messy—turn legitimate spend into public suspicion.
Few places illustrate that tension as vividly as Folkestone & Hythe District Council, where procurement cards have been a recurring theme of online scrutiny and civic criticism. In July 2022, The Shepway Vox Team reported that FHDC had finally published two years’ worth of procurement-card data after a long delay, stressing that the Transparency Code requires procurement-card transactions to be published quarterly, with specific fields included for every line. By late 2022, we were attacking the Council’s publication as inconsistent and hard to interpret, complaining about mixed date formats and incomplete descriptions.
Fast-forward to 2025 and the Council’s own transparency pages now show procurement-card files being published by month up to September 2025. The question is no longer “is anything published?” It is: does what is published meet the standard that the law expects, and does it allow the public to understand the spending without a data-science degree?
To answer that, we analysed the procurement-card dataset covering April 2022 through September 2025 and cleaned it so that dates are stored as true Excel dates (rather than a mix of formats that can shift transactions into the wrong month when read by different software). This matters because The Shepway Vox Team’s 2022 criticism about “three different formats of dates” was not an abstract gripe; inconsistent date handling can make the same dataset appear to have “missing months” when nothing is actually missing.
The headline totals: what the cards add up to
After removing obvious exact duplicates (the same supplier, purpose, date, amount and VAT appearing more than once), the dataset contains:
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1,589 unique transactions
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£280,954.87 gross spend across the period
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The raw file totals £290,008.54, meaning duplicates can inflate totals by £9,053.67—around 3%—if someone simply “sums the column” without checking.
That duplicate inflation is not a minor technicality. In any public debate about spending—especially spending that will inevitably include meals, hotels and vouchers—getting the totals wrong undermines trust before the substance is even discussed.
Who FHDC spent the most with: the “Amazon and Screwfix” reality check
Yes, Amazon features heavily. But the biggest beneficiary isn’t a retailer at all.
The top supplier by gross spend is DVLA at £35,584.50 (68 transactions). In other words, procurement cards are being used for substantial routine statutory or fleet-related payments—items that most residents would not think of as “petty card spending”.
After DVLA, the biggest recipients look like a blend of digital services, retail platforms and justice-related bodies:
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Live Chat – £13,250.72
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Amazon – £11,591.74 (190 transactions)
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Argos – £10,346.78
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HMCTS – £9,325.50
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HM Court Service – £6,422.50
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Text Inc – £6,003.26
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Zoom – £4,811.18
And Screwfix? It exists—but it’s small: £402.22 across 8 transactions. If you went into this expecting Screwfix to dominate, the data says: not even close.
What matters here isn’t that Amazon or Argos appear. It’s that retailer-platform spend makes it harder for the public to see, from one line, what was purchased and whether it came through the most appropriate route. That isn’t always wrongdoing; it’s often convenience. But “convenience” is exactly why transparency standards exist.
The “ice cream test”: hospitality, restaurants, vouchers and optics
The most politically sensitive part of procurement-card data is rarely the biggest number. It’s the most human number—food, drink, hotels, “staff recognition”, and vouchers.
To test this, we built a focused mini-appendix that flags transactions likely to be:
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Restaurants / pubs / cafés
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Accommodation (hotels/inns)
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Vouchers / gift cards
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Hospitality / events / staff recognition (based on the transaction description codes and supplier names)
Across April 2022–September 2025 this flagged set contains:
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130 transactions
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£17,417.59 gross—about 6.2% of all procurement-card spend
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67 suppliers, across 14 service areas
This is where the dataset stops being abstract and starts being recognisable. Among the flagged entries are line items that will read to many residents as “perfectly normal” and others that will trigger immediate questions.
A few examples, because names matter:
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Kings Cones (ice cream) – £250 (coded as “Hospitality”)
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The Brittania – £435.55 (coded as “Hospitality”)
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Multiple “Staff Recognition Costs” entries at £100 apiece with suppliers including Wetherspoons, The Pullman, The Bouverie Tap, Conchitas, Cocomee, and others.
Again, none of these lines prove impropriety. But they do prove why procurement cards become a recurring story. Residents don’t argue about “merchant category codes.” They argue about what looks like meals, pubs, hotels and vouchers, and whether those items were necessary, authorised, and supported by receipts.
The Shepway Vox Team has repeatedly framed this as a transparency and governance issue—warning that meals, accommodation and travel may appear in the card data while the public cannot easily see the policy boundaries for what officers may claim. In 2025, our tone has remained combative, publishing further commentary and claims about procurement-related concerns at FHDC. You don’t have to share the rhetoric to recognise the underlying democratic point: if you publish sensitive categories without the context and clean data structure required by the Code, you invite suspicion by design.
The governance story hiding in plain sight: where the “human spend” sits
When we rank those flagged hospitality/restaurant/voucher/accommodation items, a pattern emerges. The spend is not evenly spread across the Council:
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The highest flagged service-area total is Governance Law & Reg Services at £3,728.37 (28 transactions), followed by Gov Law & Democracy at £2,948.12.
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The single biggest flagged supplier is Westenhanger Castle at £3,812.90.
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The largest “flagged months” include July 2022 (£2,327.58) and April 2024 (£1,859.40).
A resident might reasonably ask: what did those events relate to, what approvals existed, and how do those choices align with FHDC’s own policies? Those questions are not accusations. They are the normal civic questions that transparency is meant to answer quickly.
Transparency Code 2015: is FHDC compliant?
The Code is explicit: councils must publish details of every procurement-card transaction, including the date, the department, the beneficiary, the amount, VAT that cannot be recovered, a summary purpose, and a merchant category.
On publication recency, FHDC’s own website shows monthly procurement-card files available up to September 2025, which goes beyond the minimum quarterly cadence.
The harder issue is field compliance—whether the published dataset contains what the Code actually asks for, in the way it asks for it.
Based on the dataset structure provided here, two Code items are at risk:
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“VAT that cannot be recovered.”
The dataset contains a VAT column, but it is not labelled as irrecoverable VAT, and in local government those are not necessarily the same thing. -
“Merchant category.”
The dataset includes purpose/description fields (often ledger-style), but a clear merchant-category field is not obvious from the published structure in front of the reader.
That doesn’t mean the spending is wrong. It means the publication may not meet the Code’s intent: enabling residents to understand the spending simply, consistently, and confidently.
And this is exactly the point that runs through The Shepway Vox Team’s older critiques: if the Council supplies the public with “dirty” or inconsistent data, the public argument becomes about the quality of the data rather than the merits of the spending.
The practical conclusion: the cards aren’t the scandal—messy transparency is
The procurement-card data does not, by itself, prove misuse. What it proves is that procurement-card spending spans everything from DVLA payments and software services to retailer platforms, court-related spend, and a small but reputationally potent stream of hospitality, vouchers and recognisable venue names.
That reality demands two things from any council that wants the argument to be about facts rather than insinuation:
First, publish procurement-card data that meets the Code’s fields precisely—especially irrecoverable VAT and merchant category.
Second, publish it in a way that is clean enough that a resident can’t mistakenly “find” missing months, inflated totals, or scrambled dates—problems that have already fuelled years of criticism.
In the end, transparency isn’t about producing a spreadsheet. It’s about producing a spreadsheet that stands up in daylight.
If you have a story which you think we should be looking at, then do contact us at: TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me – Always Discreet, Always Confidential.
The Shepway Vox Team
Dissent is Not a Crime
