Folkestone & Hythe Has Kent’s Highest Band D Council Tax for the 23rd Year in a Row

The official Band D benchmark says Folkestone & Hythe has sat at the top of Kent’s council tax table since 2004-05. It did so under the Conservatives who ran the council until May 2023, and it’s still doing so under the Green/Liberal Democrat administration that has followed. In local politics, some records are worn like a badge of honour. This one is more like an unpaid bill with a very long memory.

There are many ways to lose an argument in local politics, but one of the more ambitious methods is to pick a fight with a government spreadsheet – (Band D Council Tax figures 1993 onwards (revised)) – and hope the spreadsheet blinks first.

It hasn’t. Using the government’s Band D area council tax table — the benchmark Whitehall itself uses for comparing council tax levels between areas — Folkestone & Hythe comes out highest in Kent in the uploaded data for 2026/27, and not by accident or as a one-year wobble. On that table, the district has been top every single year from 2004/05 onwards. That is 23 straight years in first place in a competition no council should be trying to win.

And the politics of that run matter. The Shepway Vox Team was already pointing out in 2019 that this unwanted record had been built during years of Conservative control. Official council governance material says political control changed after the May 2023 local elections, with the administration thereafter led by the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats. So the clean, unavoidable point is this: Folkestone & Hythe had Kent’s highest Band D council tax under the Tories who were in power until May 2023, and it has kept that title since they lost control as well.

That matters because one of the loudest public push-backs has come from Cllr Tim Prater, who is now the district council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance. Writing on FHLD on 1 March 2024, Prater argued that Folkestone & Hythe does not have the highest council tax in Kent – Spoiler alert: It does. But once you get beyond the headline and into the workings, the trick becomes obvious. He was not really disputing the full Band D bill residents pay. He was shifting to a narrower comparison based on the district council’s own slice of the charge. On that more selective measure, he said Maidstone’s district element was higher.

That is a real distinction, but it is not the same argument. Residents do not pay their council tax in neat constitutional slices. They do not get a discount because part of the pain was inflicted by a different tier of local government. They pay the total bill that lands on the mat. And the government’s own technical notes say Band D is the benchmark for comparing council tax levels between areas over time. So if the public question is, “Which Kent district has the highest council tax bill?”, the recognised yardstick is the full Band D figure, not the carefully filleted portion most flattering to whoever is defending the budget this week.

What makes this row slightly absurd is that The Shepway Vox Team has been saying the same thing for years. In 2019 we said Folkestone & Hythe had the highest council tax rates in Kent since 2004/05. In 2020 it returned to the point. In 2022 we said the district officially had the highest council tax in Kent for the nineteenth year in a row. In January 2024 we said the district was likely to make it twenty-one in a row. This isn’t a fresh revelation unearthed from dusty files. It’s an old, stubborn fact that’s come round again for another year. And in 2026/27, Folkestone & Hythe District Council once again tops Kent’s Band D council tax table — the 23rd consecutive year it has done so, whatever Cllr Tim Prater says to the contrary.

The fair version is this. If you ask a narrower question about the district council’s own share, politicians can make a more nuanced case and Cllr Prater is entitled to try. But if you ask the ordinary question in the ordinary way — which Kent district has the highest Band D council tax? — the answer from the official table is brutally consistent. Folkestone & Hythe. Under the Conservatives before May 2023, and under the current Green/Liberal Democrat administration since. Different political colours, same expensive headline.

And that is the closing problem for the council. Once a record lasts this long, it stops looking like a misunderstanding and starts looking like a fixture. Twenty-three straight years at the top of Kent’s Band D table is not a statistical hiccup. It is not a typo. It is not cured by waving around a smaller sub-total and hoping nobody notices the larger one attached to their direct debit. You can explain the bill. You can rearrange the blame. You can write a very clever article about which bit counts most. But the household still pays the household bill.

The spreadsheet, unlike politics, doesn’t do spin. It just sits there, year after year, quietly ruining the talking points.

The Shepway Vox Team

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