Kent County Council Budget 2026/27 Explained: Growth, Environment & Transport (GET) Spending and What It Means for Roads, Highways, Waste and Transport

Kent County Council’s Growth, Environment & Transport (GET) committee papers for 2025/26 and 2026/27 show a clear shift in both the size and the shape of the directorate’s budget. The headline is simple: the GET net budget rises by just under 7% in cash terms — and still rises once you allow for inflation. But the story underneath is less about party labels and more about contracts, waste volumes, the true cost of keeping roads safe, and an important new funding stream that arrives with fanfare… then becomes less certain.

Two budgets, two administrations — but one set of unavoidable pressures

The 2025/26 budget papers were produced under the Conservative administration led by Roger Gough, with the relevant committee report dated January 2025.

The 2026/27 budget papers were produced under the new leadership team, with Linden Kemkaran listed as Leader of the Council in the GET committee report dated January 2026.

In 2026/27, the GET committee’s political leadership is set by four Cabinet Members – pictured above, left to right: Paul Webb (Community & Regulatory Services), Paul King (Environment, Coastal Regeneration & Special Projects), David Wimble (Economic Development & Special Projects), and Peter Osborne (Highways & Transportation).

The Conservatives ran the council up to 1 May 2025, after which Reform UK took charge. The key point for readers is that 2025/26 is essentially the “last Conservative-set” budget year, while 2026/27 is the first full budget year shaped under the new administration’s priorities, even though many of the costs in both years are locked in by contracts and national rules.

The headline: the GET net budget rises by £14.0m

The simplest like-for-like comparison in the papers is the GET “net budget”.

A quick translation: net budget is the amount left to pay after a service’s own income (fees, charges, specific grants) has been taken off. It is the part that has to be funded from the council’s general resources such as Council Tax, Business Rates, and general government grants. The 2026/27 papers explain this definition in plain terms.

On that basis, the documents show:

• 2025/26 GET net budget: £201.478m

• 2026/27 GET net budget: £215.503m

That is a cash increase of £14.025m, or +6.96% year-on-year.

Is it still “up” once inflation is considered? Yes.

Inflation has eased compared with the post-pandemic spike, but it has not disappeared. The Office for National Statistics recorded CPI inflation at 3.2% in the 12 months to November 2025.

Meanwhile the Office for Budget Responsibility’s November 2025 forecast expects CPI inflation at 2.5% in 2026.

If you “deflate” (strip out) roughly 2.5–3.2% inflation, the 2026/27 GET budget still rises in real terms by roughly £7.6m to £9.0m compared with 2025/26 — meaning the directorate is not merely treading water; it is getting more spending power.

That said, the GET papers repeatedly make the point that their biggest cost pressures aren’t always captured by CPI. Road maintenance and construction costs can inflate faster than the general cost of living — and KCC explicitly references unusually high past inflation in highways using specialist indices.

The mechanism: “growth pressures” overwhelm “savings”, so the net budget rises

Local authority budgets are often presented as a change statement — and KCC uses the same approach. The 2026/27 report describes the Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) as the bridge that “transforms” one year’s budget into the next by adding pressures and subtracting savings.

Quick translation: MTFP is the council’s multi-year forward plan showing how it expects costs and funding to change over time. It is not a single pot of money; it is a roadmap.

For 2026/27, KCC summarises the GET picture like this:

• Spending growth pressures: +£24.76m

• Savings/income proposals: -£6.38m

• £7.85m funded from earmarked reserves (more on this below)

• Leaving a remaining “ask” to be met from general funding.

The detail table in Appendix E reinforces the scale: total spending pressures of £24.785m set against total savings/income/grant of £6.378m.

Two terms matter here:

Growth pressures are not “nice-to-haves” by default. In council jargon they include pay increases, contract inflation, demand changes, and new legal duties — plus, sometimes, new policy choices.

Earmarked reserves are pots of money the council has set aside for a specific purpose. They are not “free money”; using them can ease a one-year squeeze, but it can also store up problems if recurring costs are being paid with one-off cash.

Notably, in 2025/26 the GET appendix shows only £0.715m of reserves movement, whereas in 2026/27 the table shows material reserve drawdowns (over £8.0m shown as drawdowns, netting to a £7.85m reserve-funded element in the narrative).

In plain English: 2026/27 doesn’t just cost more — it also leans more heavily on reserves to manage the transition.

What is actually driving the increase?

The GET papers point to three main engines: waste, highways/transport, and a large block labelled as “service strategies & improvements” (the most overtly political category).

1) “Service strategies & improvements”: where policy choices show up

Appendix E shows “Service Strategies & Improvements” at £15.038m out of total growth pressures of £24.785m.

And the main report makes the significance explicit: it says items considered “local choice and/or policy considerations” sit under this heading and account for roughly £15m of the £24.76m growth pressures.

Translation: this is the category that most clearly reflects what the administration wants to do — not just what it must do.

The papers do not present this as a single “Reform policy package” line item; rather, it is a basket of changes. But the classification matters: it signals that a substantial portion of the budget growth is not purely mechanical inflation.

2) Waste and environment: inflation, rising tonnages, and a key income stream that weakens

The 2026/27 report’s environment/waste section lists several concrete cost drivers, including:

• Contract price inflation of around £3.0m

• £0.984m for increased waste tonnages linked to housing and population growth

• £0.541m of dilapidation costs (repairs identified through condition surveys across the waste system)

• Cost realignments where actual costs are higher than previously budgeted.

  Final Draft Budget

Then there is the eye-catching item: a £7.7m “revenue contribution to capital” for a new Waste Transfer Station in Folkestone & Hythe, funded from an earmarked reserve and “not base funded”.

A quick translation: a revenue contribution to capital means using day-to-day money (revenue) to pay for a long-term asset (capital). Councils do this when they want to avoid borrowing or when they have one-off funds available.

But perhaps the most politically sensitive waste line is about EPR.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a national policy that shifts the cost of dealing with packaging waste away from councils and onto the companies that produce or place packaging on the market. KCC describes it as legislation coming into effect in 2025/26 that diverts disposal costs “on to the manufacturer”.

In 2025/26, KCC says it would receive a guaranteed £13.3m of EPR income. It also states that the money (net of a behaviour-change pressure) is to be held in an earmarked reserve pending clarity on expectations.

In 2026/27, the tone shifts. The report describes a reduction in EPR income of £1.6m, reduced from the 25/26 level, and notes that this effectively offsets what would otherwise be new savings/income.

So one of the most important “compare and contrast” points is this:

2025/26 contains a big, guaranteed new income stream (EPR).
2026/27 assumes less of it — while underlying waste costs continue to climb.

That is exactly the kind of change that can make a later-year budget look “tougher” even if the council is not becoming less ambitious.

Finally, looming in the background is ETS.

In these papers ETS refers to the Emissions Trading Scheme applying to Energy-from-Waste facilities, which KCC says would place a levy on tonnes sent to final disposal (including the Allington plant) with costs estimated at £12m–£17m per year, effective from January 2028.

Translation: even as the council wrestles with today’s waste bill, it is also preparing for a significant future national-policy cost — which helps explain why “behaviour change” and recycling-related savings are treated as strategic, not cosmetic.

3) Highways and transport: contracts, inflation, and the cost of keeping roads safe

If waste is about tonnage and contracts, highways is about assets — and the bill for keeping them safe.

The 2025/26 papers describe “exponential increases” in pothole, drainage and customer enquiries, linking pressures to rainfall, traffic, and the problem of fixed funding in a period when highways inflation was exceptionally high. They cite RPIx 12.2% and BCIS 29% in explaining why fixed budgets “buy less”.

Quick translations:

• RPIx is a variant of the Retail Prices Index (excluding mortgage interest).

• BCIS is the Building Cost Information Service, a widely used construction cost index.

In 2026/27, the highways pressures become more itemised, including:

• £2.9m contract price inflation across highways and public transport schemes

• £2.8m uplift linked to a re-tendered highways term maintenance contract (a new contract price after re-procurement)

• £0.75m set aside for the increasing regularity of road and embankment collapses and sinkholes — described as the five-year average cost that can no longer be absorbed from reserves.

And the report continues to underline a structural point that dwarfs the annual argument: KCC says the level of investment needed for “steady state” — keeping the network in the same condition year to year — is far above current levels, with a large backlog.

Translation: this is not a one-year pothole problem; it is the compounding cost of an ageing network plus years where funding did not keep pace with real construction inflation.

The economic backdrop: easing inflation, falling interest rates — but councils still act like borrowing is expensive

One might expect a lower interest rate environment to ease council budgets. Rates have indeed been coming down: the Bank of England cut Bank Rate to 3.75% in December 2025 and said it expects rates to “fall gradually further”, depending on inflation and pay growth.

However, the GET papers show why that doesn’t automatically translate into a lower GET budget.

First, the 2025/26 report states that the capital programme was prepared on the presumption of no new borrowing to fund new schemes.

Second, the 2026/27 report stresses that capital capacity must prioritise “safety vital” works and then focus on reducing impact on the revenue budget, with supporting treasury information to follow in final budget papers.

Translation: even with rates drifting down, the council is still behaving as though borrowing is a last resort, and is looking for grants, reserves, and “invest to save” logic rather than simply financing everything through debt.

So: has the budget grown or fallen — and why?

On the evidence in the committee papers, the GET net budget for 2026/27 has grown, not fallen:

• Up £14.0m in cash (+6.96%)

• Still up in real terms given CPI inflation running at 3.2% (Nov 2025) and forecast 2.5% for 2026

And the “why” is a combination of:

1. Contract and price inflation in waste and highways (the unglamorous but relentless core of local government finance).

2. Demand/activity changes, especially waste tonnages linked to housing and population growth.

3. Service strategies & improvements — explicitly identified as the main bucket for “local choice/policy” decisions and amounting to around £15m of growth pressures.

4. A weakening in EPR income assumptions versus the “guaranteed” 2025/26 position, reducing how far new savings and income can offset pressures.

5. Greater reliance on earmarked reserves to fund one-off or time-limited items (notably the £7.7m Waste Transfer Station contribution), helping manage the transition but also highlighting that not all spending growth is being absorbed in the base budget.

The political read — with the paperwork kept firmly on the table

The change of control on 1 May 2025 inevitably colours how residents read these figures. But once you strip the committee papers back to their moving parts, the 2026/27 increase looks less like a one-party “signature” and more like the product of a council trying to hold together essential services under stubborn, real-world pressures.

The first pressure is contractual reality. Large parts of GET’s work — from waste handling to highways maintenance — are delivered through long-term contracts whose costs rise with labour, fuel, materials and market pricing. Even when national inflation cools, these services don’t reset to yesterday’s prices. They re-price when contracts are renewed, they escalate through agreed mechanisms, and they bite hardest where the work is unavoidable: keeping roads safe, moving waste, and meeting basic statutory obligations.

The second is simple workload. Kent’s network ages every day; drainage fails, surfaces break, extreme weather accelerates deterioration, and reactive repairs cost more than planned maintenance. At the same time, a growing county produces more waste, putting upward pressure on tonnages and on the infrastructure that handles them. None of that cares who sits in County Hall.

The third is the danger of treating “new money” as permanent. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) was sold nationally as a shift of packaging waste costs away from councils and on to producers. In practice, as these papers show, it behaves less like a guaranteed windfall and more like an income stream whose size, timing and conditions can change — and when it changes, the council must fill the gap or reduce what it planned to do.

And then there is the part that is political, in the proper sense: choices. The 2026/27 papers explicitly identify a large slice of the growth as “service strategies and improvements” — the area where local policy decisions most clearly sit. That is not automatically good or bad; it is simply where priorities become spending lines. One administration might use that space to invest, another to retrench, but either way the budget reveals the same truth: after contracts, demand and national funding shifts have taken their share, the remaining room for manoeuvre is smaller than most voters imagine.

So the fairest reading is also the most unsentimental one. The 2026/27 GET budget rises because the underlying cost of running the county’s core environment, highways and transport functions is rising — and because the council, under new leadership, has chosen not to meet every pressure purely by shrinking the service to fit the envelope. Whether residents experience that as a justified defence of standards or an avoidable expansion of spend will depend on what the money delivers on the ground: fewer service failures, safer roads, more reliable waste operations — and transparency about which elements are necessity, which are policy, and which are one-off fixes paid for by reserves rather than a sustainable base budget.

The Shepway Vox Team

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