Folkestone’s Housing Register Houdinis: A Masterclass in the Peter Principle and FHDC Maths

In the hallowed, wood-panelled halls of Folkestone & Hythe District Council, it appears that “sanity checking” has been officially outsourced to the same department responsible for locating the Loch Ness Monster. Last week, the district witnessed a masterclass in what happens when the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger Effect decide to hold a joint committee meeting.

On Thursday, 22nd January, Adrian Hammond (pictured) -—the council’s Strategic Housing Manager and a man one assumes owns at least one working calculator—informed the District and Parish Councils’ Joint Committee that there were 1,250 households on the housing register (36 minutes). It was a solid number. A confident number. A number that suggested Mr. Hammond had, at the very least, glanced at a spreadsheet before breakfast.

However, the ink on that report was barely dry before a different reality began to emerge from the shadows of the Civic Centre. According to the written Portfolio Holder reports prepared for the upcoming Full Council meeting on 28th January, Cllr Rebecca Shoob, the Cabinet Member for Housing and Homelessness (pictured), has already put her own figure in print. While she hasn’t “taken the stage” just yet, her published update boldly declares the figure to be “almost 1,450“

For those playing along at home, that is a discrepancy of roughly 200 households. To put it in local terms, that’s an entire village of people who have either been miraculously conceived or entirely erased from existence in the space of a long weekend.

A Convergence of Incompetence

What we are witnessing is the Peter Principle in its purest form: the phenomenon where employees are promoted to their level of incompetence. One can only imagine the promotion cycle that led to a “Strategic” Manager and a “Cabinet Member” being unable to agree on a four-digit number. Perhaps the council’s next “Strategy” will involve teaching the cabinet the lyrics to the “Ten Green Bottles” song, though we fear they’d lose count by bottle eight.

But we mustn’t forget the Dunning-Kruger Effect, that delightful psychological quirk where the least competent among us possess the highest levels of confidence. Only in the Civic Centre could two people stand before the public with such absolute certainty while being 16% apart on their basic facts. It takes a special kind of talent to be so confidently wrong that you make a 200-household error look like a rounding mistake.

The “Invisible” 200

Where are these 200 phantom households? Are they living in a sub-dimension of Otterpool Park? Have they been “optimised” out of the Strategic Manager’s report, or did the Cabinet Member simply find them down the back of a sofa in the Council Chamber?

While the council continues to struggle with the “significant additional legislative requirements” of social housing, one might suggest a more modest legislative requirement: that the left hand should occasionally introduce itself to the right hand before they both start shouting different numbers at the public.

As the council prepares for the 2026/27 budget, residents can only hope the Finance Department uses a different set of abacuses than the Housing Team. Otherwise, we might find that while the council projects a surplus, they’ve actually accidentally bought a small island in the Pacific they forgot to mention.

In the meantime, if you are one of the 200 households who exist for Cllr Shoob but remain invisible to Mr. Hammond, please do let us know. We’d love to hear how the weather is in the Folkestone & Hythe District Void.

The Shepway Vox Team

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