Folkestone & Hythe Ward Budgets: Where the Money Went

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s ward budget scheme ought to be one of the easiest things in local government to follow. Thirty councillors. Up to £3,000 each. Up to £90,000 a year. Small grants for local groups. Nice, neat, wholesome. Instead, once we followed the numbers properly, we found a paper trail that is less “clear public accountability” and more “mind the gap”.

There are some council schemes where you expect the fog. Giant capital projects. Opaque land deals. Procurement exercises that seem to have been designed by Kafka after a long lunch. But ward budgets are supposed to be the easy stuff. A councillor has a pot. A community group applies. A grant is approved. The public can see what happened.

That, at least, is the sales pitch.

The council’s own scheme says each of its 30 councillors has up to £3,000 to help community projects. That gives a theoretical maximum of £90,000 a year, or £270,000 over three years. The terms and conditions also make clear that any amount left unallocated by the closing date returns to the general fund.

So we did what residents ought to be able to do without needing a crash course in spreadsheet forensics: we followed the money.

And the first thing we found was that the uploaded councillor workbook does not show the full scheme as the council itself describes it.

Across the three years, the full theoretical maximum is £270,000. But the uploaded workbook records only £260,900.00 of budget. In other words, before we even get to the question of what councillors spent and what they did not, the workbook is already £9,100 short of the full three-year scheme maximum.

That is the first crack in the story.

Because that £9,100 is not ordinary underspend. It is not money clearly shown in the workbook and then left unused. It is budget that simply is not represented in the uploaded workbook at all.

Once that is understood, the whole picture gets sharper.

Across the full three years, the uploaded workbook records £246,698.19 of spend from £260,900.00 of recorded budget. That leaves £14,201.81 recorded but unspent. So the total gap between the full theoretical scheme ceiling of £270,000 and the spend actually recorded comes to £23,301.81. But that headline gap has two very different parts: £9,100 missing from the workbook itself, and £14,201.81 recorded in the workbook but left unspent.

That distinction matters, because it means there are really two separate stories here. One is about the coverage of the workbook. The other is about what happened inside the chunk of the scheme the workbook does record.

The year-by-year picture tells the same story.

In 2023/24, the full scheme maximum is £90,000. The uploaded workbook records £87,000, and spend of £79,277.18. In 2024/25, the scheme maximum is again £90,000, the workbook again records £87,000, and spend comes out at £85,003.25. In 2025/26, the scheme maximum is still £90,000, but the workbook records £86,900 and spend of £82,417.76.

So the shortfall against the full annual scheme ceiling is £10,722.82 in 2023/24, £4,996.75 in 2024/25 and £7,582.24 in 2025/26.

But again, those are not all the same kind of shortfall. In 2023/24, £3,000 of that gap is because the workbook is short of the scheme maximum, and £7,722.82 is because recorded budget was not spent. In 2024/25, it is £3,000 missing from the workbook and £1,996.75 recorded but unspent. In 2025/26, it is £3,100 missing from the workbook and £4,482.24 recorded but unspent.

That is the honest way to read the figures. Not as one vague blob of “underspend”, but as a mixture of missing workbook coverage and money that was recorded but not used.

So where does the missing £9,100 appear to sit?

The uploaded workbook points to three obvious gaps. Tony Hills has no 2023/24 section. Nicola Keen has no 2024/25 section. Nicola Keen also has no 2025/26 section. That accounts for £9,000. Then there is a further £100 because Abena Akuffo-Kelly’s 2025/26 section is recorded at £2,900 rather than £3,000.

Now, to be fair, the workbook alone cannot tell us why. It may reflect omitted sections. It may reflect some change in the council’s actual membership at different points. It may reflect an administrative quirk. But whatever the explanation, the plain fact remains that the uploaded workbook does not, on its face, show the full £90,000 annual scheme maximum the council says exists.

And that is before we get to the really local question: which councillors actually used what they had?

This is where the scheme stops being an abstract accounting exercise and starts becoming a story about political choices.

Some councillors used the scheme much more fully than others. Across all three recorded years combined, the largest unspent totals belong to Bridget Chapman, David Godfrey, David Wimble and John Wing. Bridget Chapman tops the table, driven in large part by one striking detail in the workbook: her 2025/26 section shows no recorded spend at all.

That matters because under the council’s own rules, unallocated ward budget money goes back to the general fund rather than being rolled forward for local groups to use later. In plain English, if a councillor does not use the pot, local community projects do not get that money.

So this is not just a technical point for accountants and obsessives. It goes to the heart of what the scheme is supposed to do. A ward budget exists to support local projects. If notable chunks of it are not being used, that is not just dead money on a spreadsheet. It is opportunity lost for groups that might have benefited.

Once we move from councillors to recipients, the workbook tells another revealing story.

The money does not simply vanish into a thousand tiny random grants. It clusters.

The largest recipient grouping across the three years is Charivari / Strange Cargo on £19,172.38. That is about 7.8 per cent of all spend recorded in the workbook. After that come Jim Jam Arts on £5,142.62, the 20 mph zone grant on £4,950.00, and The Real Power of Music CIC on £4,853.95.

That does not prove anything improper. The scheme rules are broad enough to allow support for community projects, arts, youth, sports, wellbeing, facilities, local environmental improvements and support for particular groups. But it does tell us something important: the scheme is not just a scatter of tiny acts of civic kindness. It has repeat beneficiaries. It has recurring cultural and community projects. It has clear concentrations of support.

And that is politically interesting, because ward budgets are one of the few places where councillor priorities become visible at a very local level. The workbook shows where the money clustered, and who kept turning up in the funding stream.

The council’s rules themselves are not weak. In fact, on paper they are pretty strict. The supporting-evidence guide says applicants must provide supporting evidence and explicitly warns that a self-made spreadsheet does not count as acceptable proof. The terms and conditions say applicants must attach evidence such as quotes, and they say officers must keep records of the funding approved and expenditure incurred.

That is exactly why the reconciliation problem matters.

Because once we brought in the second spreadsheet, the supplier-payments extract, the public trail did not suddenly become clearer. It became harder to follow.

Part of the problem is scope. The uploaded extract runs only from May 2023 to February 2026, so it is not a full end-to-end record of the three years. Part of the problem is language. The councillor workbook often describes projects or events, while the supplier extract identifies the payee. So even before anyone tries to match row against row, the two datasets are talking in different dialects.

That is why the cleanest public explanation is not a hyper-technical row-matching exercise, but the full annual reconciliation against the proper £90,000 baseline. Once the numbers are rebuilt that way, each year can be split into three parts: what was spent, what was recorded in the workbook but left unspent, and what is missing from the workbook altogether.

That is the honest picture.

In 2023/24, the gap against the full £90,000 maximum is driven mostly by ordinary underspend inside the workbook. In 2024/25, the gap narrows sharply because the recorded budget is used much more fully. In 2025/26, the gap widens again, split between money missing from the workbook and money recorded but not spent.

So the public problem here is not just that there are gaps. It is that the gaps are of different kinds, and the public trail does not make that easy to see without reconstruction.

And that, really, is the story.

Not that the ward budget scheme was fake. The workbook plainly records substantial spending on recognisable local causes.

Not that every discrepancy proves wrongdoing. It does not.

The real story is more mundane, and in some ways more annoying. A supposedly simple scheme is not simple to audit.

The council asks the public for evidence. Fair enough. But residents are entitled to expect the same standard back. If applicants must clearly show what they want the money for, the council should make it easy for residents to see clearly what happened to that money afterwards.

At the moment, that still takes too much digging.

And for us, that is the sting in the tail. This is meant to be the easy stuff. Small grants. Local causes. Clear rules. Straightforward transparency. Yet even here the public trail is patchier, harder to reconcile and less resident-friendly than it should be.

For a scheme sold as simple, that says rather a lot.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime