Wood-Burner Boom in Folkestone & Hythe District: 1,356 Recorded Installs — and the Council’s Blind Spot

An Environmental Information request has forced Folkestone & Hythe District Council to put hard numbers on something residents have been arguing about for years: how fast wood-burning stoves are spreading — and what, in practice, the council can (and cannot) do about them.

The answer, based on the council’s own Building Control records and “competent person scheme” notifications, is 1,356 stove-related installation events recorded between 1 December 2020 and 19 December 2025. But that figure is not a census of how many wood-burners exist. It is a count of installations that passed through official channels — and it sits uneasily alongside independent mapping that suggests far higher underlying prevalence in several parts of the district.

What the council actually disclosed

The request asked for two main routes by which a solid-fuel appliance ends up “known” to the council:

1. Building Control applications (used where work is signed off by the council rather than a self-certifying installer).

2. Competent person scheme notifications (for example HETAS-style self-certification), which are sent to the council after installation.

From the spreadsheets released:

• Building Control applications (stove / solid-fuel / flue-liner related): 54 in total.
  Broken down by application year: 1 (CY2020), 11 (CY2021), 15 (CY2022), 15 (CY2023), 6 (CY2024), 6 (CY2025).

• Completion/final certificates recorded on those Building Control cases: 36 (counted by the “completion date” field).

• Competent person scheme notifications (solid-fuel related): 1,302 in total.
  Broken down by year: 46 (CY2020), 228 (CY2021), 244 (CY2022), 233 (CY2023), 433 (CY2024), 118 (CY2025 year-to-date).

Put together, that is 54 + 1,302 = 1,356 recorded installation events in just over five years.

So what share of the district’s homes is that?

Kent County Council analytics reportedly put the district at 54,389 households as of 31 March 2024.

On that basis:

• 1,356 ÷ 54,389 = ~2.49% of households (about 2.5%) having an installation event recorded in the last five years.

And if the household count has risen since March 2024 (which is likely), the percentage would be fractionally lower, not higher.

But here is the crucial point: this 2.5% is not “how many homes have a wood-burner.” It’s closer to “how many installations hit the council’s systems over five years.”

Why that distinction matters:

• Many stoves were installed before December 2020, so they never appear in this five-year window.

• Some installations may be non-notified (installed without Building Control sign-off and without a competent-person notification).

• Some properties may have more than one appliance, and “notifications” count events, not necessarily unique households.

So the council’s disclosed numbers are best read as a minimum, administrative footprint — not the total stock.

Where are the installs happening? The council’s own counts vs what the maps suggest

The council’s competent-person notifications cluster most heavily in these wards (top of the list):

• North Downs West: 246 – inside the AONB

• Walland & Denge Marsh: 177 – A Site of scientific and Special Interes

• North Downs East: 163 – Inside the AONB

• Hythe: 157

• Hythe Rural: 106

• Romney Marsh: 90

• New Romney: 82

• Cheriton: 75

• Sandgate & West Folkestone: 53

• East Folkestone: 52

• Folkestone Harbour: 44

• Folkestone Central: 33

• Broadmead: 24

That pattern already tells a story: this isn’t just a “posh village” phenomenon or a “town centre” phenomenon — the recorded growth spans the North Downs, Hythe and its rural hinterland, and the Romney Marsh communities, as well as Folkestone’s urban wards.

Now layer on the independent mapping the council is not producing itself.

An interactive ArcGIS “story map” built from Energy Performance Certificate data is widely used in this debate, because it lets you zoom right down into local areas and compare the likely spread of stoves. Researchers have also published peer-reviewed work using EPC fields as an “alternative data source” to estimate wood-burner presence and patterns across communities.

And locally, ShepwayVox has already applied that kind of EPC-based approach ward-by-ward inside Folkestone & Hythe — producing a picture that helps explain why the council’s five-year “paper trail” can look small compared with what people smell in winter.

Some of the stand-out findings reported in that EPC-based analysis are striking:

• Hythe is presented as a hotspot by density, with a very high concentration of appliances per square kilometre (even if rural wards can show higher percentages).

• Folkestone Central and Folkestone Harbour also show high urban concentrations in the same style of analysis — exactly the kind of place where wood-smoke can linger in still air between buildings.

• North Downs West is shown with a very high share of homes estimated to have stoves, but low density — the classic rural pattern: more space, more detached homes, more solid-fuel culture, fewer people per hectare.

Put bluntly: the council’s notifications tell you where the paperwork is. The EPC-based mapping tells you where the appliances are likely to be. They are related, but they are not the same thing.

Why doesn’t the council just check?” — because it generally can’t

This is where public expectations often collide with English law.

There is no general power for a district council to go door-to-door, enter private homes, and look for wood-burners simply out of curiosity or for “stock-take” purposes. Entry powers exist — but they are tied to specific legal functions, and they come with notice requirements, limits, and safeguards.

Here are the main routes people confuse:

1) Building Control enforcement (Building Act 1984)
Local authorities have powers of entry connected to enforcing the Building Act / Building Regulations. But entry to domestic premises is not a casual right: the Act builds in notice requirements and conditions. 

2) Statutory nuisance investigations (Environmental Protection Act 1990)
If smoke is alleged to be a statutory nuisance, councils have duties to investigate and powers of entry as part of that enforcement framework — again, tied to a complaint or inspection function, not a general survey of household appliances. 

3) Clean Air Act functions (Clean Air Act 1993)
The Clean Air Act contains inspection/entry provisions for enforcing the Act — but these powers are not a blank cheque to enter private dwellings at will, and in practice smoke enforcement often relies on external evidence and observation rather than interior “searches.”

4) Housing inspections (Housing Act 2004)
Councils can enter to inspect housing conditions under defined circumstances, with notice and safeguards — but again, that is about housing standards and hazards, not a general power to search for stoves. 

So the uncomfortable reality is this: unless a stove goes through Building Control or a competent-person notification, the council may never know it exists — unless it becomes the subject of a complaint or an enforcement trigger.

The air-quality problem: what gets measured — and what doesn’t

Wood smoke is most politically explosive not because it is visible, but because of fine particles (PM2.5 and PM10). These are strongly linked in public health literature to harm, and they are a key reason wood-burners have become such a contentious local issue.

Yet locally, critics argue the monitoring regime focuses elsewhere. ShepwayVox has repeatedly highlighted that Folkestone & Hythe is not in an Air Quality Management Area and has historically not monitored PM2.5/PM10 in a way residents would recognise as meaningful local surveillance, even while publishing annual reporting focused heavily on nitrogen dioxide. 

That matters because the council can be “right” on paper (meeting certain reporting duties, using diffusion tubes, publishing an annual report) and still be missing the pollutant most relevant to wood-smoke exposure in winter evenings.

What the numbers really mean — and what they don’t

The council’s disclosure is important precisely because it is limited.

What it shows with confidence:

• Over five years, there has been a steady stream of recorded installations across the district — with a notable spike in competent-person notifications in CY2024 (433).

What it cannot show on its own:

• The total number of wood-burners currently in the district.

• The number installed outside official routes.

• Where smoke exposure is worst street-by-street (that needs monitoring, modelling, and complaints intelligence).

And that is why the debate keeps circling back to the same blunt question: are we arguing about a small minority of homes, or a mainstream heating habit that official records only partially capture?

The best reading — supported by EPC-based mapping work and local analysis — is that there are likely far more appliances in the district than the five-year notification trail suggests, especially in places like Hythe, Folkestone Central/Harbour, and high-prevalence rural wards such as North Downs West. 

A practical conclusion for residents and councillors

If Folkestone & Hythe wants a serious, grown-up argument about wood-smoke, it needs three things at the same time:

1. Routine transparency: publish annual counts of Building Control solid-fuel cases and competent-person notifications as standard, not only when forced by an EIR request.

2. Measurement that matches the concern: if PM2.5 is the health anxiety, then PM2.5 needs to be measured and discussed openly — not treated as an optional extra. 

3. Honesty about enforcement limits: councils can investigate nuisances and enforce building rules, but they are not empowered to conduct blanket inspections of private homes just to “see who has a stove.”

The EIR release has done one public service: it has replaced speculation with a baseline. The next step is whether the Green led council treats that baseline as “job done” — or as the start of proper local accountability on what people are breathing every winter.

If you have story you think we should be looking at, then please do contact us at: TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me – Always Discreet, Always Confidential.

The Shepwayvox Team

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