Folkestone & Hythe District Council Expenses: Officers Get Higher Meal Allowances Than Councillors

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” George Orwell wrote, and at Folkestone & Hythe District Council that principle appears to have wandered off the page and onto the lunch receipt. Buried in the council’s paperwork are two separate subsistence systems: one for officers and one for councillors. Nobody’s ordering lobster thermidor on the rates here, so this isn’t a banquet scandal. It’s something far more gloriously local-governmental: a tale of sandwiches, small print and a bureaucratic food chain in which even a modest lunch can reveal who, in the eyes of the rulebook, is entitled to be just that little bit more equal.

At first glance, the sums look modest enough. In fact, they’re so modest that some readers may wonder whether anyone at the council has bought a meal deal since the Coalition years. But that’s precisely why the comparison matters. When the numbers are small, the principle stands out more clearly. The question isn’t whether anyone is feasting. It’s why one class of person gets the slightly better plate.

Start with officers. The council’s reimbursement policy says staff can claim subsistence where official duties prevent them taking a meal at home or at their usual workplace and force them to incur additional expenditure. Claims must go on the proper form, be submitted the following month, be approved by a manager and be backed by receipts. The maximums are £6.88 for breakfast, £9.50 for lunch, £3.76 for tea and £11.76 for an evening meal. Then comes the interesting bit: the policy expressly allows an authorising manager to approve reimbursement above those limits in “exceptional circumstances”. So the officers’ scheme doesn’t just have higher caps. It also has a built-in escape hatch.

Now look at councillors. The constitution says subsistence expenses must be necessarily incurred while carrying out an approved duty at a place more than three miles from home, and the claim should be for the actual amount spent up to the set maximums. Under paragraph 14.7.2, breakfast is capped at £5.88, lunch at £8.13, tea at £3.21 and the evening meal at £10.06. Members are also told not to claim for meals provided free of charge. Before that, the constitution says that wherever possible the council will pre-book and pre-pay meals and accommodation for councillors attending meetings out of the authority, and that receipts should be obtained and submitted where possible.

Put the two systems side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. Officers get the more generous meal caps across the board. Breakfast is £1 higher. Lunch is £1.37 higher. Tea is 55p higher. The evening meal is £1.70 higher. No single figure is earth-shattering. There won’t be angry mobs gathering outside Civic Centre East with placards reading What do we want? Fifty-five pence for tea. When do we want it? Before 6pm. But the overall message is clear enough: the council’s own rules value officers’ subsistence a little more generously than councillors’ subsistence.

There may well be arguments for that. Officers are employees. They may travel more often, stay away longer and incur costs in the course of carrying out operational duties. Councillors are not employees and claim under a members’ allowances scheme tied to approved duties. That distinction is real, and in part it may be perfectly sensible.

But the wording still tells its own story. Officers have higher caps and more obvious discretion. Councillors have lower caps, tighter wording and a specific warning not to claim for anything free. One scheme reads like a staff policy with managerial flexibility. The other reads like a system drafted by people who’ve seen enough newspaper headlines to know exactly how awkward a councillor’s lunch receipt can become.

That’s what makes this faintly comic. Councils routinely speak in grand language about fairness, transparency and accountability. Yet the true anthropology of the institution often turns up in the meal allowances. Not in the speeches. Not in the mission statements. In the sandwiches. Somewhere in the machinery of district government, someone has looked at a breakfast, a lunch, a tea and an evening meal and decided that one set of stomachs may stretch slightly further than the other.

To be fair, these are hardly decadent rates. Nobody is ordering oysters and billing the taxpayer. If anything, some of the sums feel like they belong to a lost era when a decent café still sold tea in a thick mug and a bacon roll didn’t require a direct debit. But that almost sharpens the point. Where the money is modest, every difference is deliberate. These figures don’t exist by accident. They reflect choices, assumptions and institutional habits about who is trusted with what.

And that, really, is the story. Not a scandal. Not an outrage. Just a revealing little hierarchy, written in pounds and pence. Officers get the higher meal caps and an explicit route for exceptional approval above them. Councillors get lower caps, more rigid wording and a warning not to double-dip on anything free. It’s mundane, faintly absurd and entirely on brand for local government: a philosophical statement about status, disguised as an expenses table.

In the end, FHDC’s subsistence rules don’t show councillors living on gruel while officers tuck into silver-service suppers. The sums are too small for that and the grandeur far too second-class rail ticket. What they do show, though, is the council’s house philosophy in miniature. When the institution writes the rules for itself, one group gets the slightly fatter allowance and the comforting little safety valve of discretion, while the other gets the tighter cap and the raised bureaucratic eyebrow. That’s the real story here. Not a feast. Not a famine. Just the familiar local-government miracle of turning a sandwich, a cup of tea and a few lines of policy into a tiny constitution of status. At FHDC, even a sandwich comes with a pecking order: one lunch for the people who run the place, another for the people elected to keep an eye on them. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”