Kent County Council Budget Compared: Reform UK 2026/27 vs Conservatives 2025/26 — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Kent County Council (KCC) has now put two very different budget stories on the public record.

The first is the Conservative administration’s approved 2025/26 budget (voted through in February 2025) — a document that tried to “balance” the books while warning, repeatedly, that the council’s financial resilience was being eroded.

The second is Reform UK’s first ever KCC draft budget for 2026/27 (published January 2026), branded “Reforming Kent’s Budget” — and it is, in places, strikingly candid about how close to the edge KCC believes it is operating, particularly on adult social care and reserves.

What follows is a granular, compare-and-contrast — not in party-political slogans, but in the actual moving parts: what the council says it will spend, where it says the money will come from, what risks it admits to, and what looks like optimism bordering on wishful thinking.

The big picture: a council getting bigger — not because it wants to

Start with the simplest measure the public can understand: how much KCC plans to spend on day-to-day services after fees, charges and specific grants (what the documents call “net expenditure”).

• 2025/26 (approved): assumed net revenue budget £1,530.9m.

• 2026/27 (draft): planned net expenditure £1,647.8m, up £116.5m (7.6%) on 2025/26.

That is not “a bit more”. That is an extra £116.5 million in a single year just to keep the machine running — and KCC is clear that the underlying driver is not discretionary policy, but the heavy, grinding combination of demand, prices, market costs, and the hangover from current-year overspends being baked into the next year’s baseline.

A quick layman’s translation: what “net budget” really means

When KCC quotes its net budget, it is talking about the spending it must fund from its “real” resources (council tax, general government funding, and its own income), after stripping out things like ring-fenced grants that must be spent on specific purposes. The 2026/27 draft explicitly calls net budget “the best measure of spending for which we should be held to account as elected representatives.”

Where the extra money goes: the shape of KCC’s pressures hasn’t changed — it has intensified

The 2026/27 draft reduces the whole budget into one page. On that page, two services dominate the council’s life:

• Adult social care: £787.0m (47.8% of the budget), 11.0% increase. 

• Children’s services: £421.0m (25.5%), 7.7% increase. 

Everything else — roads, environment, transport, corporate functions, debt costs — fights over what remains.

The approved 2025/26 budget, meanwhile, shows a directorate “net cost” picture (after income and grants) that illustrates the same fundamental truth: social care and children’s services already dominate the council’s spend.

For 2025/26, the directorate net costs are listed as:

• Adult Social Care & Health (ASCH): £643.2m

• Children, Young People & Education (excluding schools’ delegated budgets): £449.2m

• Growth, Environment & Transport (GET): £201.6m

• Chief Executive’s Dept (CED): £25.4m

• Deputy Chief Executive’s Dept (DCED): £81.4m

• Non-Attributable Costs (NAC): £110.1m

• Corporately Held Budgets (CHB): £20.0m

• Budget requirement total: £1,530.9m

But be careful: some totals aren’t perfectly like-for-like

The 2026/27 draft’s “one-page” categories compress and regroup things (for example, it combines “Non-Attributable” with corporately held budgets), whereas the 2025/26 appendix shows them separately. So you can compare the overall net budget cleanly, but comparisons between some sub-lines need a cautious eye.

Council tax: the Conservatives went to the limit; Reform say they won’t — but they still bank more money

What the Conservatives did for 2025/26

The approved 2025/26 budget includes a 4.99% council tax increase, which the report translates for readers as £1.54 per week (about £80.37 per year) on the County Council share for a Band D household.

It also explains the mechanics: referendum principles allowed a general increase plus an adult social care element, and KCC proposed 2.995% general and 1.995% for the adult social care levy (total 4.99%). 

What Reform propose for 2026/27

The draft 2026/27 budget sets out that the Government’s draft principles again allow up to 5% total for adult social care authorities (3% core plus 2% adult social care flexibility), but KCC’s proposed increase is 3.99%.

So, on the household charge itself, Reform’s draft is lower than the Conservatives’ previous year.

The twist: council tax income still rises faster than the headline percentage

Even with a 3.99% charge increase, the draft budget’s one-page summary says council tax funding rises to £1,048.1m, a 5.1% increase in the resources line.

That is not necessarily a contradiction. Council tax income can rise faster than the charge if the tax base grows (more homes, fewer discounts, better collection), or if collection fund balances move. The 2025/26 budget explicitly talks readers through this logic and notes that tax base growth matters materially — each 1% council tax rise in 2025/26 is said to generate about £9.5m, illustrating how sensitive the system is.

The political gamble buried in the MTFP

The 2026/27 draft’s medium-term plan states: “Council Tax charge increase Nil Nil” for 2027/28 and 2028/29.

To a lay reader, that reads like a promise: we won’t put up your KCC council tax again for two years. But in the very same one-page summary, KCC also shows forecast net spending rises of £106.5m (2027–28) and £95.5m (2028–29), alongside a “shortfall in government settlement” of £52.6m and £42.1m. 

In plain English: the draft plan tries to freeze the tax charge while spending keeps rising sharply. That makes the gap problem worse — and the document openly acknowledges the scale of the gap that “would need to be resolved” in those later years.

This is where “good, bad, ugly” starts to bite: a low headline tax rise now can be politically attractive — but it risks turning into either sharper service cuts, bigger savings targets, or delayed pain later.

Funding from government: more money on paper, more uncertainty in practice

Both budgets are shaped by a familiar dynamic: KCC says spending pressures rise faster than the extra funding.

The 2026/27 draft is unusually explicit about why planning is so hard: it cites heightened uncertainty from (a) rising in-year overspends and (b) uncertainty around a reworked funding system (“Fair Funding 2.0”), delayed announcements, and lack of detail needed to make robust estimates. 

On the one-page summary, the draft claims the central government settlement rises to £595.4m, a 12.5% increase. Elsewhere in the draft, a settlement table shows how multiple grant lines shift year-to-year, including the overall “Total Grants in CSP” figure moving from £535.940m (revised 2025/26) to £595.404m (provisional 2026/27).

The approved 2025/26 budget similarly itemises the final settlement changes and the dependency on specific grants (social care grant, employer NICs compensation grant, children’s social care prevention grant, and more).

The good: the 2026/27 draft is clearer than most local budgets about how brittle the assumptions are.

The bad: the plan still has to be built anyway — and when the settlement is uncertain, councils often end up planning on the optimistic side and scrambling later.

Adult social care: the centre of gravity — and the place where optimism goes to die

If you want a single paragraph that explains why KCC budgets keep ballooning, it is this:

The 2026/27 draft says quarter-2 monitoring for 2025/26 shows forecast overspends of £47m, “primarily in adult social care”, and warns that if this cannot be eliminated it may require a drawdown from reserves, further weakening financial resilience.

That sentence is not a footnote. It is the budget story.

What the Conservatives acknowledged in 2025/26

The approved 2025/26 budget already warned that reserves — not debt — were becoming the bigger short-term resilience risk, and it explicitly described reserve drawdowns for smoothing (including council tax smoothing) and the need to rebuild general reserves towards the 5% target.

It also notes that adult social care funding lines (including the levy and grants) are “passported” into spending plans, with passporting into adults and children’s services totalling £40.6m and £6.8m. 

What Reform’s draft says for 2026/27

Reform’s draft doesn’t just state the adult social care budget is bigger; it describes the mechanics of why it is bigger.

It identifies additional pressure coming from:

• Full-year effect of 2025/26 overspends (£37.7m)

• revised forecasts for price uplifts (£9.9m)

• cost drivers (£15.8m)

• demand driver increases (£25.3m)

…and it says these adult social care pressures are “by far the most significant factors” driving the increased need for savings and income to balance the budget. 

Then the draft states the additional savings and income package includes £30.0m in adult social care — alongside £20.1m in children’s services and £26.3m in other services.

The good: this is a more transparent admission that adult social care is not a controllable “efficiency problem” but a structural pressure driven by demand, market costs, and the fact that prior-year overspends become next year’s baseline.

The bad: the savings numbers are large, and KCC’s own recent history (spelled out in the draft) shows under-delivery of savings has become a recurring risk.

The ugly: the draft’s narrative implies that even tougher spending controls are already being imposed mid-year to contain adult social care overspend — which often means the “cuts” arrive through rationing, delays, tighter eligibility, and workforce strain rather than a clean policy announcement.

Children’s services: less visible, still financially explosive

Children’s services is the other quarter of KCC’s budget that has a habit of producing nasty surprises — especially children’s social care placements and home-to-school transport.

The 2026/27 draft’s comparative tables show that, compared with the previous medium-term plan, children’s social care cost drivers have risen sharply in the updated plan (for example, cost drivers for children’s social care moving from roughly £5.1m in prior forecasts to £13.9m in the updated draft for 2026/27).

And the draft again lists children’s services as a major area for additional savings and income.

Meanwhile, the 2025/26 approved budget already highlighted the fragility around schools-related funding and historic commitments, and the way education finance can shift suddenly depending on national decisions. 

For readers: children’s services costs are often not “optional”. When demand rises or placements get more expensive, councils don’t get to say “no” in the way they might with a discretionary grant scheme. That is why these lines keep dominating the budget debate.

Reserves: both administrations lean on them — Reform’s draft is blunt about how dangerous that is

Reserves are the council’s rainy-day money: not a separate treasure chest, but the financial shock absorbers that prevent sudden collapses when costs spike.

2025/26: a warning already written in bold

The approved 2025/26 budget says usable revenue reserves at the end of 2023–24 were £357.6m, with a general reserve of £43.0m, and it emphasises the strategy of keeping general reserves between 5% and 10% of the net revenue budget. It also states plainly that using reserves to support revenue spending reduces resilience, and that reserves now pose a more significant risk to resilience than debt.

2026/27: the draft describes a pattern, not a one-off

The 2026/27 draft includes a “conclusions” section on reserves that is unusually stark: it refers to three successive years of drawdowns from reserves to balance overspends (with a fourth year likely) and calls this “a significant cause for concern”.

It also states the draft budget is balanced in 2026/27 only by using £25m of one-off solutions:

• £9m from further “flexible use of capital receipts” (using proceeds of asset sales to fund certain revenue costs), and

• £16m from earmarked reserves “no longer necessary for the original purpose”.

This is where lay readers should pause. One-off money can only be spent once. If you use it to pay for day-to-day services, it does not solve the underlying problem; it buys time.

The draft says exactly that: these one-off measures “will need to be replaced by sustainable solutions in future years.”

The good: Reform’s draft is honest that this is a sticking-plaster.
The bad: it still uses the sticking-plaster.
The ugly: the document simultaneously warns that reserves resilience is already under strain and may need further drawdowns if 2025/26 overspends persist.

Capital spending: from £1.419bn to £1.901bn — and a roads-heavy bet on external grants

Capital budgets are the council’s long-term investment plans: buildings, roads, large projects — the stuff you buy or build to last.

What was approved for 2025/35 (Conservatives)

The 2025/26 budget papers summarise a ten-year capital programme (2025/26 to 2034/35) with:

• £1,419m total planned capital spending

• £766m confirmed/indicative government grants

• £366m proposed borrowing

• £287m other sources (capital receipts, developer contributions, external funding, revenue). 

The same section notes the programme faces major pressure from backlogs in highways and buildings, and that the approach of “no new borrowing” would be reviewed for the 2026/27 budget — while also warning of risks “including danger to life and limb” if repair works are not completed.

What Reform propose for 2026/36

The draft 2026/27 budget proposes total capital planned spending £1,901m over 2026/27 to 2036/37 — an increase of £482m on the previous plan — and it shows the programme weighted heavily towards:

• £1,341m roads and infrastructure (71%)

• £386m school buildings (20%)

• £174m other (9%).

It also states: new borrowing = nil, with the internal funding largely being “existing borrowing commitments” plus other internal sources. And the executive summary reiterates: the capital programme includes no new borrowing impacting on the revenue budget, and new schemes come from recycling funding from removed schemes or schemes now funded externally (for example, confirmed school basic needs funding). 

The good: the programme is clear about prioritising safety-critical works and minimising revenue-budget damage from debt costs.

The bad: a programme this grant-heavy is vulnerable to government decisions and delivery slippage; it is only as solid as the external funding assumptions.

The ugly: the draft also includes a separate schedule of “potential capital projects” that are not funded yet — and the numbers hint at the true scale of Kent’s backlog. One line alone — “Maintaining Kent’s Roads” — is shown as a potential programme costing £1,169,744k across years. That is the uncomfortable subtext: even £1.901bn may not be enough to catch up.

Borrowing, debt and treasury: “no new borrowing” meets real-world debt management

Debt matters to the public because it affects how much of the budget is swallowed by interest and repayments instead of services.

The 2025/26 capital strategy explains key concepts in plain terms: borrowing is temporary finance; it must be replaced over time by Minimum Revenue Provision (MRP) — the annual “set-aside” from revenue to repay debt. It also shows MRP rising from £60.1m (2025/26 budget) to £60.9m (2026/27 budget) and £67.9m (2027/28 budget) in the forward estimates. 

The 2026/27 draft treasury section states the expectation that debt will reduce as existing debt matures and is not replaced, and that repayments would be made from cash and investment balances where that makes sense. 

There is also a more technical (but revealing) detail in the 2026/29 draft appendices: it references the impact on debt interest costs of £50m early debt redemption in 2025/26, and other changes linked to debt charges and investment income fluctuations. 

For readers, the point is simple: KCC is trying to keep a lid on borrowing costs, but the more it uses cash to repay debt, the more it may lose investment income — another trade-off the budget has to juggle. 

So how does Reform’s draft “stack up” against the Conservatives’ approved budget?

The good

Reform’s 2026/27 draft is, in places, more direct about the council’s predicament than the language many councils prefer. It is explicit about uncertainty in funding reform, the impact of in-year overspends on the next year’s baseline, and the seriousness of repeated reserve drawdowns.

It also proposes a lower council tax increase (3.99%) than the previous year’s 4.99%, while still setting out the referendum principles clearly. 

And on capital, it lays out a programme that prioritises safety-critical works and keeps “new borrowing” at zero — which, in a world of high interest rates and stretched revenue budgets, is a defensible strategy.

The bad

The draft budget is balanced only by £25m of one-offs — and it admits these must be replaced later.

That should worry residents because one-offs tend to be the gateway drug to a familiar cycle: “just one more year” of temporary fixes, followed by abrupt retrenchment when the fixes run out.

Also, the medium-term plan’s assumption of no council tax charge rises in 2027–28 and 2028–29 sits uncomfortably alongside large forecast spending increases and stated future shortfalls.

That is a political choice dressed as a financial plan — and the laws of arithmetic do not bend for manifestos.

The ugly

The ugliest truth is that both administrations are budgeting against a backdrop of deteriorating resilience.

The Conservatives’ approved 2025/26 budget warned that reserves were becoming a bigger risk than debt and that overspends could further erode resilience. 

Reform’s 2026/27 draft goes further: it describes three years of reserve drawdowns to cover overspends, likely a fourth, and calls this “a significant cause for concern”. 

And in the present tense, it notes a £47m forecast overspend in 2025/26 “primarily in adult social care”.

If that overspend hardens, then the 2026/27 draft — already balanced with one-offs — begins the year from a weaker starting position than its neat tables suggest. The document itself acknowledges it does not yet include replenishment for potential 2025/26 drawdowns until the outturn is confirmed. 

In everyday terms: KCC is trying to run faster while the floor beneath it is getting thinner.

The bottom line for residents

Reform’s draft budget for 2026/27 does differ from the Conservatives’ 2025/26 plan in tone and in some choices — notably the lower council tax increase and a larger, roads-heavy capital programme. 

But the fundamentals are brutally continuous:

1. Adult social care and children’s services dominate the finances. 

2. Overspends roll forward into the next year and inflate the baseline. 

3. Reserves are being used too often to patch structural gaps.

4. Future years contain openly acknowledged gaps — especially if council tax is politically frozen. 

If you want the shortest honest verdict: the 2026/27 draft reads like an administration trying to look residents in the eye and say, “this is what the system is doing to us.” But it is also a document that, at key pressure points, relies on temporary money and optimistic future assumptions — the very things that have helped produce the crisis-atmosphere it describes.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices Of Voxatiousness