KCC Adult Social Care: £62m Rise And Three Directors In One Year

Kent County Council says adult social care is improving. The payments data says it’s getting dearer. The audit report says the savings governance was weak. And since Reform UK took power in May 2025, adult social care has now had three directors in one year: Richard Smith until November 2025, Sarah Hammond until May 2026, according to information provided to Shepway Vox, and now Michael Thomas-Sam, whom KCC papers identify as “Interim Director Adult Social Care, Adult Social Care and Health”. That’s a lot of churn at the top of KCC’s biggest and most humanly sensitive service.

Sarah Hammond’s (pictured) resignation lands at a difficult moment for County Hall. Only days earlier, KCC published a polished media release on 7 May 2026, saying Adult Social Care had delivered a “positive set of performance results”. Diane Morton, Reform UK Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care, said she was “extremely proud” and that KCC was seeing “real improvements”. That may be true as far as the chosen performance indicators go. But it is not the whole story.

Nobody should sneer at better care. If fewer older people are entering long-term residential care, if carers are getting more help, and if more people are in care homes rated Good or Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission, that matters. Adult social care is not a spreadsheet game. It is dementia, disability, frailty, home care, care homes, hospital discharge, safeguarding, unpaid carers and people’s daily dignity.

But Morton’s own quote contains the phrase that should have been the headline, not the footnote: “demand and costs remain high”. Our analysis of KCC’s published invoices-over-£250 data shows Adult Social Care & Health rose from £836.19m in 2024/25 to £898.36m in 2025/26. That is a rise of £62.18m, or 7.44%.

Put simply, KCC’s largest care directorate did not become smaller, cheaper or easier to manage. It got bigger. Adult Social Care & Health accounted for 41.86% of KCC’s published payments over £250 in 2024/25. In 2025/26, that rose to 43.35%. Nearly 43p in every £1 in this public payments dataset now sits in adult social care.

The supplier data underlines the scale. The biggest 2025/26 ASCH line in our comparison is “REDACTED – Personal Payment”, at £54.26m, up from £44.21m the year before. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust stood at £43.64m, while other major ASCH totals included LDC Care Company Limited at £15.94m, Time 4 U Ltd at £11.22m, Caretech Community Services Ltd at £10.15m, Achieve Together Limited at £9.55m, and The Avenues Trust Group at £9.25m.

None of that proves wrongdoing. Care costs move for many reasons: demand, complexity, placements, direct payments, provider fees, equipment, health partnerships and inflation. But it does mean the “costs remain high” caveat is not a decorative sentence in a council press release. It is the story.

Then comes the audit. In the 19 May 2026 Governance and Audit Committee papers, Internal Audit reviewed “ASCH Saving Delivery Plan Governance”. The aim was to test whether lessons from the 2024/25 ASCH delivery plans had been fed into the 2025/26 plans, and whether governance arrangements were adequate for “effective monitoring and reporting”. The opinion was “Limited”, with three High, three Medium and one Low action.

KCC’s own audit definition says a Limited opinion means internal control, governance and risk management are “inadequate” and create an “unacceptable level of residual risk”. In other words, this was not a gentle officer nudge. It was the council’s own assurance process saying adult social care savings governance was not good enough.

To be fair, the audit did not say nothing was happening. It found a “dedicated savings team”, daily huddles, finance engagement, director attendance at weekly assurance meetings, weekly highlight reports and what it called “a positive culture of continuous learning”. So this is not a story about officers doing nothing. It is more awkward than that: meetings were happening, reports were being written, and the audit still came back Limited.

The first high-risk finding was the one that should make councillors sit up: “Lack of Transparency over ‘Alternative Savings’ plans for undeliverable Savings.” Internal Audit said several saving lines considered no longer deliverable had “no indication” of how the shortfall would be managed or what alternative saving would replace the initiative.

That is the budgetary equivalent of a bridge with the middle missing. If a saving will not arrive, the public needs to know what replaces it. Otherwise the pressure does not vanish; it moves somewhere else — into overspend, reserves, council tax pressure, future cuts, or another service.

The same finding said mitigating actions or alternative savings were not fed into the December 2025 Strategic Reset Programme exception report, which “may weaken accountability and transparency”. Translation: the very report meant to help senior people see the problem may not have shown how the hole was being filled.

Then came the red-rated savings problem. Internal Audit said the Red BRAG rating treated savings as “undeliverable in 2025/26”, but did not distinguish between savings delayed to future years and savings “deemed permanently unachievable”. That distinction matters. A delayed saving is a timing problem. A dead saving is a hole in the plan.

The number attached to that warning was not small. Internal Audit referred to £23.1m of red-rated ASCH portfolio activity in the October 2025 portfolio report and said KCC should carry out a “structured root cause analysis” at the “earliest opportunity”. This is the sentence that cuts through the spin: KCC says adult social care is showing progress; Internal Audit says £23.1m of adult social care savings activity was red-rated and needed proper root-cause analysis.

There was more. The audit said risks and barriers were recorded only at a “very high level” and that there was “no comprehensive risk log” to monitor and review them effectively. In a service with nearly £900m of published payments, that is not admin trivia. It is governance oxygen.

The sharpest line concerned weekly meetings. Internal Audit said the reports from short-term and long-term support meetings did not include savings targets for each workstream or show how performance affected savings delivery. Then came the killer sentence: “There is also no evidence that the savings target progress and impact is discussed at the weekly meetings.”

So yes, KCC can say some adult social care indicators improved. It can fairly praise frontline staff. But it cannot sell the public a soft-focus story while the same directorate has a £62.18m rise in published payments, £23.1m of red-rated savings activity, a Limited audit opinion, and three directors in a year.

This is not about blaming care workers. It is about accountability at the top. Richard Smith was there until November 2025. Sarah Hammond then held the adult social care reins until 11 May 2026, according to information provided to Shepway Vox. Now Michael Thomas-Sam appears in KCC papers as the interim adult social care director. Three directors in one year is churn. In a service under this much financial and governance pressure, churn matters.

The question for County Hall is simple. If adult social care is improving, why did the published bill rise by £62m? Which savings failed? What replaced them? Who owns the risk now? And why did Internal Audit find no evidence that savings target progress and impact were discussed at weekly meetings?

Until KCC answers those questions plainly, the Morton media release is only half the story. Adult social care is too important for spin, too expensive for fog, and too human for weak governance. The people who rely on it need safe support. Staff need stable leadership. Councillors need evidence. And the public needs to know whether Kent’s biggest care service is being governed with the seriousness it deserves.

The Shepway Vox Team

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