Folkestone Beach Huts: Council Charity Falls Short of Its Promise

Marine Walk is full, colourful and plainly popular. But when we compared the promise made in 2019 with the accounts now on file, a more awkward picture emerged: the scheme changed shape, the numbers moved, the reporting wobbled, and the wider charity is still leaning on local taxpayers.

By The Shepway Vox Team

Marine Walk is not a flop. Let us start there, because the easy caricature would be wrong. The rebuilt beach huts are occupied, the waiting list is shut, and the charity’s own reports say the chalets “continue to be viewed positively by the local community and are being enjoyed by tenants with 100% occupancy (115).” The problem is not that nothing happened. The problem is that what happened is not quite what was first sold, and the paper trail around it is much less tidy than it ought to be.

The charity at the centre of this is the Folkestone Parks and Pleasure Grounds Charity. Folkestone & Hythe District Council is the corporate trustee. The charity’s land is East Cliff and Warren, the Durlocks, Lower Sandgate Road (the Coastal Park), Radnor Park, Morehall Recreation Ground and Canterbury Road Recreation Ground. Its stated purpose is the provision of “parks, pleasure grounds or recreation grounds for the use and enjoyment of the inhabitants of the former Borough of Folkestone and the neighbourhood thereof.” It is not a freestanding outfit with its own separate machine room. Its reports say plainly that “the day-to-day finances of the Charity are administered within the financial systems of the Council,” and in 2019 the council’s own cabinet report said “the net cost of operating the Charity is met through the General Fund and is charged as a special expense to the Council Tax payers of Folkestone & Sandgate.”

That matters, because Marine Walk was presented not just as a facelift but as a financial answer. In November 2019, the council’s cabinet was asked to back a £500,000 prudential-borrowing package for a scheme to refurbish 16 existing chalets, demolish 58 others and install 120 new chalets. The 2020 charity accounts then described the approved scheme as increasing chalet numbers “from 74 to 136.” The report promised “a sustainable net increase in income helping to improve its financial position over the longer term.” In its conclusion it went further, saying the proposal would deliver “an immediate, and sustainable return on investment” and had the potential “to reduce some of the financial burden to the Council through the Special Expense charged to the Council Tax payers of Folkestone and Sandgate only.” The financial model behind that sales pitch was bullish: annual net returns from the scheme were projected at £9,462 in year one, £33,843 in year two, £36,606 in year three, £54,023 in year four and £57,391 in year five, with the report saying the proposal would return £2.715 million over 25 years.

For a while, the later accounts made this look like a loose end. The original scheme was 136. The later reports kept saying 115. That gap is now explainable. The council’s own current beach huts page says the area was redeveloped in 2020 and that the works included “the refurbishment of 35 of the existing huts and installation of 80 new wooden ones.” So the missing 21 huts were not a mystery after all. The project was reworked from the earlier 136-hut concept into a 35-retained-plus-80-new scheme. The real criticism is not that the number changed. It is that the annual charity accounts never explain that change clearly enough for ordinary readers.

The popularity of the finished scheme is not in serious doubt. The terms and conditions uploaded with the council’s own paperwork say the council manages 115 huts at Marine Walk on behalf of the charity. From 2023, the Folkestone huts moved to five-year leases with an annual mutual break option. The annual rent is £1,600 for large huts and £1,200 for small ones, with rents “increased each year by 5%.” The same document says the waiting list is closed. The charity’s site-level note then shows Marine Walk generating gross income of £108,000 in 2022/23, £137,000 in 2023/24 and £147,000 in 2024/25. On the narrow question of market demand, the scheme has plainly worked.

But that is not the same as saying the original business case has been vindicated. The direct Marine Walk surpluses shown in the charity’s site note are strong: about £82,000 in 2021/22, £76,000 in 2022/23, £96,000 in 2023/24 and £100,000 in 2024/25. Yet the same accounts also show a yearly repayment to the council of £56,544. Put those two things together, and the retained annual benefit comes out at roughly £25,000, £19,000, £39,000 and £43,000. On our calculation, that produces a cumulative post-finance surplus of about £128,000 by 31 March 2025. That is not disastrous. But it is not the effortless financial triumph implied by the 2019 rhetoric either. It sits slightly below the year-four cumulative path implied by the original model, and well below the five-year cumulative figure of £191,327 that our own May 2025 reporting drew from the scheme’s financial projections. Marine Walk is generating money. What is far less clear is whether it is generating the level of net benefit first advertised.

The cost story is awkward too. The finished scheme cost £577,000, not £500,000. The later accounts settle on an extra £69,500 from the council, repayable over the original ten-year period, plus £7,500 from Creative Foundation. But the first post-completion report did not say that. The 2020/21 annual report said the council had agreed “an additional financial contribution of £77,000.” Later years then restated the breakdown differently. That may be reconcilable in substance, but it is still sloppy reporting. So is the timing. The 2019 report expected work to start in early February 2020 and new tenants to be in by early May. Instead, the 2020/21 report said the scheme was “delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” with work only starting in June 2020 and completing in February 2021. Covid was real and disruptive, but the original programme did not survive contact with reality.

Then there are the paper-trail problems. In the 2020/21 narrative, the charity said that because of delay “no rental income was received in 2020/21” and that “there were also no maintenance or financing costs incurred in 2020/21 as a result of the delayed project.” Yet note 7 for that same year shows Marine Walk with £29,000 of running costs and no income. In the 2022/23 accounts, note 9 says the “Sum Held By Folkestone & Hythe District Council” is £291,000, while note 10’s own components add up to £309,000. In the 2023/24 accounts, the loan note refers to total borrowing with FHDC of £669,500, even though the years either side say £569,500 and the repayment schedule only makes sense on the lower figure. None of this proves wrongdoing. It does, however, suggest a reporting culture that is a good deal more casual than one would hope to see where a council is simultaneously trustee, lender, manager and reporting body.

Confidence is not helped by the filing record either. In May 2025, we reported that Charity Commission records showed the 2022/23 accounts were filed 453 days late and the 2023/24 accounts 120 days late, after the charity had already filed its 2020/21 accounts 87 days late. The 2024/25 accounts, still awaiting approval, are now 52 days overdue. That matters because a scheme like Marine Walk can only be properly scrutinised if the public can see the numbers while they are still timely and meaningful. Trust is hardly strengthened when the accounts arrive late and the figures inside them require detective work.

All of that said, it would also be wrong to pretend the rest of the charity is some kind of civic wasteland. There is real value here, and the accounts show it. In 2024/25 the Coastal Park retained its Green Flag for the 18th consecutive year; six free family rock-pooling sessions were held; Changing Places toilets were installed at both Radnor Park and the Coastal Park; Radnor Park retained its Green Flag for the eighth year running; and East Cliff’s sports facilities were again described as well used by the public and schools alike. Those are proper public-benefit outcomes, and they deserve to be recognised as such.

The snag is that the wider estate is still expensive to run, and Marine Walk is doing much of the commercial heavy lifting. In 2024/25, the site note shows East Cliff and Warren costing £70,000 net, Lower Sandgate Road £91,000, Radnor Park £292,000, Morehall £50,000 and Canterbury Road £50,000. Marine Walk, by contrast, delivered a £100,000 site surplus before loan finance. That makes it the charity’s strongest income-producing asset by some distance. But one profitable strip of seafront does not make the whole charity self-funding. The 2025 accounts still say “the net expenditure of the Charity was financed by Folkestone & Hythe District Council,” and the balance sheet remains tight: £175,000 of current assets, £158,000 of current liabilities and just £17,000 of net current assets at 31 March 2025. Most of the apparent strength is locked up in land, buildings and investment properties. Total net assets were £5.658 million, but fixed assets alone were £5.923 million, including five investment properties valued at £1.914 million. This is an asset-rich charity, not a cash-comfortable one.

So where does that leave Marine Walk? Not in the bin, and not on a victory parade either. The fair conclusion is that the scheme is half-success and half-warning. It has succeeded in the obvious sense: the huts are occupied, the income is real, the debt is being repaid and the asset is no longer the tired, semi-empty stretch described in 2019. But it has failed to match the neatness of its original sales pitch. The number of huts changed. The cost rose. The timetable slipped. The financing story moved. The reporting was inconsistent. And when we strip out the headline occupancy figures and look at what is left after servicing the loan, the grand promise of an “immediate, and sustainable return on investment” looks a lot less triumphant than it did on cabinet paper.

That, in the end, is the real story. Marine Walk was sold as a tidy answer: spend half a million, build more huts, cut the burden on local taxpayers. What the years since have delivered is something messier and more recognisable to anyone who has watched local government for long enough: a popular scheme, a changed scheme, a pricier scheme, and a charity that still depends on the very council tax base the original report hinted it might ease. The beach huts now look sharper than the paperwork behind them. And that, for a council-run charity, is not quite the compliment it sounds like.

The Shepway Vox Team

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