Kent County Council’s Own Population Projections Show an Ageing Crisis That Depends on More Migration and Births – While Its Reform UK Leaders Attack Both

When the leader of Kent County Council, Cllr Linden Kemkaran – pictured, went on KMTV after Rachel Reeves scrapped the two-child benefit cap, her message was blunt.

“Contraception is freely available,” she said, and there is “no excuse for having more children than you can afford to bring up.”

It was a neat soundbite for a party built on “tough love” rhetoric. It was also at odds with the evidence produced by her own council.

Because buried in a dry statistical bulletin from Kent County Council’s analysts is a stark conclusion: if Kent wants to sustain its public services and economy over the next 25 years, it needs more future workers – which, like it or not, means either more children, more migration, or both.

And it is being said under the political control of a party whose national platform is to freeze almost all immigration.

Who runs Kent – and what they believe about migration

Since the May 2025 local elections, Kent County Council has been run by Reform UK. The party won outright control of the council and chose Linden Kemkaran, a Reform councillor for Maidstone South East and former Conservative, as leader.

In her first speeches as leader, Kemkaran promised to put the “people of Kent” first, trumpeted a “Kent-first” approach, and signalled a harder line on illegal migration.

Nationally, Reform UK’s official “Contract with You” pledges to “freeze immigration and stop the boats” and to halt all “non-essential immigration”, with narrow exceptions for some high-skilled workers. Legal commentators describe this as a generally “anti-immigration” stance.

So we have a county whose governing party defines itself by cutting immigration, and a council leader telling residents there is “no excuse” for having more children than they can afford – at exactly the moment her own statisticians are warning that the county is ageing fast and cannot replace itself through births alone.

What Kent’s population projections actually say

In August 2025, Kent County Council’s Kent Analytics team published a statistical bulletin summarising the 2022-based subnational-population-projections for the county, produced by the Office for National Statistics. The bulletin explains that these figures are used as a common framework for allocating resources to local areas.

The headline numbers are straightforward:

• Kent’s population is projected to grow from about 1.59 million in 2022 to 1.85 million in 2047, an increase of 15.9%.

• Over the same period, the age profile tilts dramatically older:

  • Children aged 0–15 fall slightly, from 304,900 to 288,800 (a 5.3% drop).

  • Working-age adults 16–64 rise from 963,500 to 1,101,200 (a 14.3% increase).

  • Older people 65+ soar from 326,000 to 458,600 – a jump of 40.6%.

By 2047, the over-65s are projected to make up roughly a quarter of all Kent residents, up from 20.4% in 2022.

Those are not “woke” numbers or political spin. They are Kent County Council’s own official projections, based on recent birth, death and migration trends.

The inconvenient truth: more deaths than births

The most politically awkward part of the bulletin is the section on “components of population change”.

Over the 25-year period from 2022 to 2047, Kent (the KCC area, excluding Medway) is expected to see:

• 392,900 births

• 464,800 deaths

• A natural change of –71,900 (more deaths than births)

• Net migration of 326,800 people, which accounts for about 129% of the county’s total population growth over the period.

Put bluntly: if you switched off migration tomorrow and kept births and deaths on the projected path, Kent’s population would shrink, and it would shrink in a way that skews older – because the people missing from the system would overwhelmingly be younger, working-age adults and their children.

So when Reform UK at county level talks about reducing the impact of migration, and their national leadership promises to freeze almost all new immigration, they are arguing against the very mechanism that keeps Kent’s population – and workforce – from going into reverse.

Why children are not a fiscal luxury – they are future taxpayers

Cllr Kemkaran’s comments were framed around fairness: why should “people who actually go out to work” see their taxes used to support larger families, she asked, when contraception is free and more “responsible” parents have limited themselves to one or two children?

There are legitimate arguments about how best to design the welfare system. But the demographic reality is that:

1. The county is not having “too many” children; it is having slightly too few to replace its population.

2. Every child who is born and grows up in Kent is a potential future worker and taxpayer in a county that will otherwise struggle to staff its schools, hospitals and care homes.

Kent’s projections show nearly 290,000 children aged 0–15 in 2047 – only about 16,000 fewer than today.They still have to be educated, clothed and housed, which is where Cllr Kemkaran’s concern about the immediate cost comes from.

But from a tax and public-service perspective, the crucial question is not “how much do children cost this year?” It is: “Will there be enough of them, with enough skills, to support a much larger retired population in 20–30 years’ time?”

Using the council’s own figures:

• In 2022, Kent had roughly 65 dependants (children plus pensioners) for every 100 working-age adults.

• By 2047, despite a modest rise in the working-age population, that climbs to about 68 dependants per 100 workers, because the number of older residents rises so sharply.

So the county is heading for more people drawing heavily on public services and pensions, supported by only slightly more people of working age.

Under those conditions, treating children as an avoidable “expense” rather than essential future contributors is more than just harsh. It is fiscally shortsighted.

The ageing crunch: what an older Kent really means

The projections spell out that the 65+ age group “shows the biggest percentage growth” in Kent and is expected to account for a quarter of the population by 2047.

What that means in practice is:

• More demand for NHS services, particularly chronic disease management, cancer care and hip and knee replacements.

• A sharp rise in demand for adult social care – home care, supported living and care home places – which is already the single biggest pressure on Kent County Council’s budget.

• More people reliant on pensions and age-related benefits funded largely at national level by today’s and tomorrow’s workers.

Older people bring experience, volunteering and community stability, but the public-finance arithmetic is unavoidable: on average they receive far more in publicly funded services than they pay in tax.

If birth rates remain below replacement and immigration is choked off, the county is left with three unpalatable options:

• Significantly higher taxes on a shrinking pool of working-age residents.

• Deep cuts to services, particularly in health, care and education.

• Or some mix of both.

No amount of rhetoric about “irritating” responsible parents, or insisting that families who have more than two children are making “bad choices”, alters that basic maths.

Why migration is not a “nice to have” in Kent’s projections

The bulletin from Kent Analytics is explicit: over the 25-year period, all of Kent’s net population growth comes from migration, because natural change is negative.

This is true at both county and district level. Across most Kent districts, births and deaths more or less cancel out or deaths outnumber births, and it is net inflows of people – from elsewhere in the UK and from abroad – that push the numbers up.

Reform UK’s national policy, meanwhile, is to freeze “all non-essential immigration”, restrict the ability of students and their families to stay, and sharply tighten the rules on long-term settlement.

Even if every element of that policy were implemented perfectly, it would hit exactly the group that Kent’s projections quietly rely on: working-age adults who move into the county, filling labour shortages and enlarging the tax base.

In other words, under the council’s own numbers you cannot have:

• an ageing population,

• fewer births than deaths,

• and drastically reduced migration,

and expect to maintain the same level of public services without serious pain.

The contradiction at the heart of Kent’s new regime

Cllr Kemkaran’s comments on the Budget were framed as a defence of the “people who go out to work and earn money and pay taxes”.

Yet the evidence assembled by her own officers shows that:

• Those future taxpayers are precisely today’s children – including those in larger families.

• There will not be enough of them to replace the big cohorts now moving into retirement.

• Without substantial net migration, Kent’s population and workforce would stagnate or shrink, even as the demands of an older population grow.

Seen against that backdrop, scolding residents for “having more children than you can afford” and attacking the removal of the two-child cap starts to look less like fiscal prudence and more like demographic denial.

You can argue about how generous benefits should be. You can argue about which kinds of migration are most useful to the county. But you cannot argue with a simple fact: if Kent continues on its current path of low fertility, fast ageing and restricted migration, then something has to give – and what gives will be tax rates, service levels, or both.

What this means for every Kent resident

For ordinary residents, the long-term consequences of ignoring this demographic reality are not abstract.

If births remain below replacement and migration is sharply reduced, Kent is likely to face:

• Higher local and national taxes on a smaller working-age population to pay for pensions, the NHS and care.

• Staff shortages in key services – from nurses and care workers to teachers, bus drivers and social workers – as the supply of younger workers dries up.

• Pressure to cut or ration services, particularly for the most vulnerable, because the funding simply will not keep pace with demand.

• Slower economic growth, as fewer workers and consumers make it harder for local businesses to expand.

Conversely, a county that accepts a balanced combination of stable or slightly higher birth rates and well-managed migration is far better placed to cope with the ageing bulge: more people in work, paying tax; more carers, nurses and doctors; more parents raising the very children who will keep Kent’s economy alive in the 2040s and 2050s.

None of this means telling people how many children to have, or opening the borders without rules. It means recognising that both families and migrants are part of the solution, not the problem.

Time for an honest conversation

Kent County Council’s population bulletin is admirably clear about the demographic pressures the county faces. It shows an older Kent, a county with more deaths than births, and a future where migration is doing all the heavy lifting to keep the population – and workforce – from shrinking.

What is missing is the political honesty to match the numbers.

You cannot lead a county that is quietly dependent on migrants and new babies, while loudly demanding fewer of both, without storing up trouble for everyone who calls Kent home.

Sooner or later, the Garden of England will have to choose: face up to its demographic reality and plan for more future workers – through fair support for families and sensible migration – or pretend that you can have an ageing population, fewer children, fewer migrants and unchanged public services.

Kent’s own figures make clear which of those futures is fantasy.

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