Folkestone & Hythe Council Fees: Prices Up Since 2019 — Are You Paying More Than Inflation?

Most people never read a council’s fees and charges appendices unless they absolutely have to. You only encounter them at awkward, very human moments: when you need a copy document, a licensing replacement, a cemetery service, or you’re dealing with a street naming change on a development. These aren’t Council Tax. They’re the council’s price-list for optional, individual services — the charges you meet only when life (or planning) puts you there.

A discretionary fee is a charge the council sets for an optional, individual service you only pay when you use it (for example, a licence replacement, a street-naming change, or a cemetery service). It is not Council Tax and it is not a statutory charge fixed by central government.

So we took Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s discretionary fee schedules from 2019/20 right through to 2026/27 (26/27 yet to be approved) and asked a simple question residents deserve an easy answer to: what has actually gone up, by how much, and is it above inflation?

The first surprise is that the documents don’t make this easy – quelle surprise. Many fees appear, vanish, get renamed, split into new lines, merged into bundles, or moved between service headings. That constant churn makes it hard for residents — and, frankly, councillors — to compare like with like across time. If you can’t track an item cleanly year-on-year, public debate becomes a fog of anecdotes.

So we did the cautious, defensible thing: we only tracked the fees that are genuinely “constant” across every year — the same charge existing in all eight schedules. That produces a core “basket” of 34 charges that never disappear. If the council wants to argue residents are overreacting, this is the test that removes the noise.

What happened to that constant basket is the story.

Across those 34 charges, the typical rise since 2019/20 lands in the high-30% range. Many increases are therefore well above inflation, by choice, over the period we can sensibly benchmark. Using CPIH (the UK’s headline inflation measure) as our yardstick, the CPIH index rises by roughly 30% from spring 2019 to late 2025. On that benchmark, 29 of the 34 constant fees increased by more than CPIH.

That isn’t a claim that every rise is illegitimate. Some services are labour-heavy; some costs genuinely have climbed. But if a council is going to raise a large proportion of its always-present fees faster than inflation, residents deserve a clear line of sight — and a clean, straight explanation of what has changed in the underlying costs, not just the price.

Two themes dominate the above-inflation increases: street naming/numbering and cemetery charges. Meanwhile, a smaller set — notably court-cost items and some taxi-related replacements — are either flat or closer to inflation.

Street naming: where the big, real-money rises show up fastest

If you want the cleanest illustration of the council’s fee trajectory, street naming and numbering is it. The same set of charges appears year after year, and the increases are stark.

Since 2019/20, the charge for changing a street name rises from £571 to £948 — an increase of £377, roughly +66%. Changing a property address rises from £57 to £104 — up £47, roughly +82%. Registering a new property rises from £114 to £177 — up £63, roughly +55%. Charges for new streets/buildings (in the common “2–10 units” bracket) rise from £217 to £364 — up £147, roughly +68%, with similar uplift patterns running through the larger development bands.

What matters here is not only the scale but the shape: some of these changes don’t look like gentle annual “indexing”. They look like step-changes — the kind residents and developers actually feel when one year’s fee suddenly becomes materially higher the next.

Cemeteries: steady upward pressure — and often ahead of inflation

The largest block of constant fees sits in cemeteries and burials. Many of these charges rise in the 30–46% band — frequently above the CPIH benchmark.

The numbers are not academic. These are the fees people encounter at moments when choice is limited and the service is unavoidable. For example, “person over 12 – single depth digging” rises from £576 to £840 (up £264, about +46%). “Internment of ashes” rises from £240 to £350 (up £110, about +46%). “Spreading of ashes” rises from £240 to £350 (up £110, about +46%). Charges connected to children’s plots show particularly sharp movements: the “purchase fee” line for “children not exceeding 12” rises from £202 to £323 (up £121, about +60%). For adults, the “person over 12 – purchase fee” rises from £559 to £736 (up £177, about +32%).

Again: this doesn’t automatically prove wrongdoing. It does, however, raise the bar for explanation. When councils talk about “full cost recovery”, residents hear a phrase that can mean two very different things: “we’re covering genuine costs” or “we’re pushing the limit of what people will pay for essential moments.” If the council wants confidence, it needs to show the workings.

Legal and land administration: some fees jump, and one outlier looks dramatic for the wrong reason
A cluster of land and legal admin charges also remain constant and show substantial growth over time. Some of these are “range” fees — a minimum-to-maximum band — and those bands widen significantly.

One example: “lease renewals” (as a range) moves from £250–£500 to £650–£960. Even on the minimum, that’s a +160% rise; on the maximum, about +92%. Another: “transfer of miscellaneous land” (range) moves from £550–£750 to £855–£1,280.

And then there is the outlier that looks sensational in percentage terms but is tiny in cash terms: the photocopying charge for land-document copies rises from £0.10 to £0.60. That’s +500% — but it’s also a 50p increase. It’s a perfect example of why “percentage” headlines can mislead. A few pennies turning into a few more pennies is not the same social impact as a £300 jump in a necessary service.

Court costs and taxi licensing: the fees that stood still

Not every fee races ahead. A small set is flat across the entire period. In particular, “summons and liability order” costs for Council Tax and for Business Rates don’t move. In real terms, that means they fall, because inflation eats their value.

Taxi-related items are comparatively restrained. “Driver badge replacement” and “vehicle plate replacement” rise by roughly +29%, which is broadly around the inflation benchmark depending on where you set the end-month. The “knowledge test” rises by about +24%, which is clearly below CPIH over much of the period.

This matters because it shows the council is capable of holding some charges steady when it chooses. That makes the above-inflation rises in other areas a policy choice, not a law of nature.

The bigger problem: a public price list that’s hard to audit

Our most important finding may not be any single increase. It is how few charges can be tracked cleanly across eight years. Only 34 fees remain constant across every schedule. Everything else is a moving target — added, deleted, renamed, repackaged, reclassified.

That isn’t just inconvenient. It undermines trust. When items disappear or reappear under slightly different wording, residents are left arguing from instinct: “they’ve doubled it” versus “no they haven’t”. The council ends up fielding criticism it could have avoided with better publication practice.

If Folkestone & Hythe wants credibility when it sets fees under “full cost recovery” principles, it should publish the price list like a dataset rather than a pamphlet: stable IDs for each fee line, a clear change log for every deletion, merger or rename, and a simple time-series view so anyone can see what rose, when, and why. That would not stop criticism — but it would force the argument onto facts, not suspicions.

And that is where we land. When we strip out the noise and look only at the fees that never go away, the picture is clear: most have risen by more than inflation since 2019/20. Residents are not imagining it. The bigger question is whether the council can now justify those rises in plain English, service by service, without hiding behind moving labels and ever-changing appendices.

If you have a story you think we should be covering then please do contact us at: TheShepwayVoxTeam[at]proton[dot]me. Always Discreet, Always Confidential. 

The Shepway Vox Team

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