Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s published payments for temporary accommodation reached £1,520,865.70 in 2025/26 under just two descriptions: Bed & Breakfast Accommodation and Self Contained Nightly Lets. That is £633,842.30 higher than the previous year, almost £500,000 above the old 2017/18 peak, and more than three-quarters of the bill now sits in self-contained nightly lets. The council is right to house people in crisis. But when the bill climbs this fast — and previous FOI answers have given different totals — residents deserve one clean recipe, not another mystery stew.
Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s temporary accommodation bill has gone from simmering to boiling over. Using FHDC’s own Payments to Suppliers data for Bed & Breakfast Accommodation and Self Contained Nightly Lets, the 2025/26 total is £1,520,865.70. That is the figure for those two descriptions alone. It is not the whole cost of homelessness, not the net budget pressure, and not a forecast. It is the published supplier-payment total for the year.
This story needs a human caveat before the numbers start clattering across the worktop. Temporary accommodation is where the housing crisis lands when someone has nowhere else to go. Families, single people and vulnerable residents still need roofs over their heads. FHDC’s own guidance says local authorities are duty-bound to provide temporary accommodation to families and individuals who meet the relevant criteria and have no alternative housing. So the issue is not whether the council should help. It should. The issue is whether residents can follow the bill.
The long-term chart tells the story better than a shopping list of figures. After a previous peak of £1.02m in 2017/18, spending fell as low as £120,351 in 2019/20. It then climbed again: £451,107 in 2023/24, £887,023 in 2024/25, and £1,520,865.70 in 2025/26. That is the highest point in the series — £499,201.73 above the old peak and 71.5% higher than last year.
That jump matters because it is too large to hide behind ordinary year-end noise. A council may face volatile demand. Invoices may land unevenly. Suppliers may bill in batches. But a rise of £633,842.30 in one year is not a spoonful of extra seasoning. It is the lid coming off the pot.
The monthly pattern shows the pressure was not neat or gentle. February 2026 was the highest month at £255,244.50, followed by October 2025 at £230,032.00 and June 2025 at £196,878.20. August was much lower at £6,846.00. That unevenness may reflect invoice timing, placement demand or payment processing. But the direction is clear: the council was carrying a heavy and expensive temporary accommodation load through the year.
The split between the two descriptions is even more revealing. Of the £1,520,865.70 paid in 2025/26, £370,492.70 went on Bed & Breakfast Accommodation and £1,150,373.00 went on Self Contained Nightly Lets. So the main heat is not now coming from old-fashioned B&B use. It is coming from self-contained nightly lets — the emergency takeaway option in the housing kitchen, useful when needed, ruinously expensive when it becomes routine.
This rise did not appear from nowhere. Shepway Vox reported in February 2026 that FHDC’s temporary accommodation spending had already crossed £1,052,870 with around three months of the financial year still to run. That was not the final bill. It was the warning smoke. The March data now shows the full-year total under the two descriptions reached £1.52m.
FHDC has also recognised the direction of travel. In October 2025 the council announced a £5m plan to expand council-owned temporary accommodation by buying at least 20 more properties. The council said using its own properties reduces reliance on private nightly-let temporary accommodation and is more cost-effective in the long term. That is a sensible idea in principle: if the emergency takeaway bill is wrecking the household budget, owning more of the kitchen starts to look obvious. Source: FHDC council-owned temporary accommodation announcement.
But good intentions do not remove the need for clean figures. Shepway Vox has previously reported that FHDC’s FOI responses on temporary accommodation costs did not line up. For 2023/24 alone, reported totals included £473,181.63, £506,611, and £818,072.91. Those numbers may have used different definitions, but that is exactly the problem. If one answer means supplier payments, another means wider temporary accommodation costs, and another includes something else, the council needs to say so plainly.
The FOI issue can be put very simply. Different totals are not automatically wrong if they measure different things. A narrow supplier-payment total will not necessarily match a finance-system total. A gross payment figure may not match a net budget pressure after subsidy. Some figures may include payments below £250, subsidy loss, procurement-card spending, internal adjustments, or council-owned accommodation costs. But residents should not need to guess which recipe has been used.
That is why the figure in this article is deliberately narrow and clear. It counts only FHDC Payments to Suppliers under Bed & Breakfast Accommodation and Self Contained Nightly Lets. It does not claim to be every penny of homelessness expenditure. It does not claim to be the final audited cost. It simply shows that, on those two published descriptions, the bill reached £1,520,865.70 in 2025/26, according to their published data.
The contract trail adds a further reason for clarity, but it should not be muddled with the annual spending chart. The January 2026 temporary accommodation framework had only just begun by the end of March 2026, so it is not the explanation for the full-year spike and it could not sensibly have overspent already. The sharper contract questions sit earlier, with the emergency accommodation arrangements, the gaps between contracts, and whether any waivers, variations or emergency authorisations explain the payments.
The council did not create the national housing crisis by itself. It cannot magic up affordable homes overnight. It is dealing with real households, real pressures and a private rental market that has become brutal for many residents due to competing interests. But none of that excuses a foggy public-money trail. A crisis may explain why the council has to spend. It does not explain why the public has to keep asking which total is the real one.
So the ask is simple. FHDC should publish one plain-English reconciliation for temporary accommodation from 2015/16 to 2025/26. It should show the supplier-payment total, any FOI total, the finance-system total, the housing-system total, any subsidy shortfall, whether VAT is included, whether payments below £250 are included, and exactly what each figure measures. It should also explain the contract, waiver and variation trail where emergency accommodation spending exceeded or moved outside the neat public contract dates.
Until then, residents are left with a kitchen where the bill has hit £1.52m, the self-contained nightly lets are doing most of the cooking, and the recipe book still has pages missing. People in crisis need homes. Taxpayers need honest figures. FHDC should be able to serve both.
The Shepway Vox Team
Discernibly Different Dissent
