FHDC Procurement Card Receipts: Dinner, Drinks and the Missing Audit Trail

The council’s FOI response has answered some questions about procurement-card restaurant spending. It has also given us a gastro-pub filed as transport, a missing lunch receipt, drinks with the tenants’ panel, and fish and chips apparently travelling without an approval trail.

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has finally served up more paperwork on its procurement-card restaurant bills. Not the full tasting menu, admittedly. More a municipal buffet: a bit of receipt here, a dab of explanation there, and somewhere near the end a small bowl marked “human error”. Chez Antoinette is not included here because this FOI response didn’t cover it. The rest — Lulivo, Sotirios, Three’s A Crowd and The Britannia — now come with enough detail to move the story on, and enough gaps to keep the eyebrows in active service.

The rules matter because FHDC’s own subsistence figures are not exactly Roman banquet territory. Officers can claim £6.88 for breakfast, £9.50 for lunch, £3.76 for tea and £11.76 for an evening meal. Councillors get even less: £5.88, £8.13, £3.21 and £10.06. Nobody’s expecting the Chief Executive to forage for berries on the A20. But when public-card restaurant bills start floating above the normal meal limits like a council-funded soufflé, residents are entitled to ask four dull but deadly questions: who was fed, why, who approved it, and where’s the receipt? [

First up, Lulivo — the lunch that appears to have joined the rail network. The FOI response says the £55.13 lunch was for Chief Executive Susan Priest and then council Leader Jim Martin after a Kent leaders meeting in London. That is £27.57 each, nearly three times the officer lunch allowance and more than three times the councillor lunch allowance. The schedule records “Lulivo Villiers St Lunch”, Susan Priest, cost code GM01 and £55.13. But the council says the itemised lunch receipt is not available because, due to a clerical error, the train-ticket receipt was attached twice. So there we are: the lunch left the station, platform unknown, calling at Transparency Parkway never.

   

Sotirios is the respectable-looking one, wearing a tie and trying not to make eye contact with the wine list. The £215.05 payment was for an annual thank-you lunch for the Strategic Tenant Advisory Panel: nine covers, made up of two Housing staff and seven unpaid tenant volunteers. The council says this formed part of tenant engagement in the Housing Revenue Account. That is a proper explanation. Tenant volunteers giving time to the housing service can be thanked without anyone calling for a public inquiry into pudding.

But even Sotirios comes with a little governance aftertaste. The receipts show £167.55 for set-menu lunches and £47.50 for drinks. The drinks included Coke Zero and pineapple juice, but also Pinot Grigio Blush, House White, spritzers and a pint of Peroni. This is not Watergate with calamari. But if HRA money pays for hospitality involving staff, volunteers and alcohol, there should be a clear recorded basis for the spend. The FOI response says policy application was “not recorded individually” and was “reviewed by approving manager”. That is less an audit trail and more a nod from someone near a filing cabinet.

Then comes Three’s A Crowd, the headline act, the procurement-card panto horse, the dinner that apparently drove itself into the car-park column. The FOI response says £154 covered a Chief Executive dinner at the LGA Annual Conference 2024 with Susan Priest, Cllr Tim Prater, Cllr Jim Martin and Cllr Connor McConville. Four people. £38.50 a head. That is more than three times the officer evening-meal allowance and nearly four times the councillor allowance. The council calls it “conference refreshments”. Refreshments? At £38.50 a head, one hopes the crisps were independently audited and the peanuts declared an approved duty.

     

The real problem is that no itemised receipt is recorded as held. The file gives us a card slip for £154, not what was ordered. Even better, the payment had previously appeared under Public Transport & Car Park Expenses. The FOI response says that was “miss coded / cross coded as included other expenses — human error”. Of course. Happens all the time. One minute you are coding parking, the next a gastro-pub reverses into the ledger with four conference delegates and a till roll in witness protection.

Finally, The Britannia: Dungeness, fish and chips, and a receipt that briefly appears to have misunderstood the concept of counting. The FOI response says £435.55 covered an annual Chairs event with 31 people: Cllr Anita Jones as host, Cllrs Tim Prater, Polly Blakemore and Mike Blakemore, four staff and 23 third parties from other mayoral or chair roles. The receipt says five covers at the top, but lists 29 fish-and-chips lunches and two plant-based burgers: 31 meals. That is £14.05 a head. This is not Versailles. This is civic batter with a side of mushy peas.

     

And yet, once again, the comedy turns into the audit question. The FOI response says no recorded authorisation, approval, sign-off, cardholder reconciliation, line-manager approval, exception approval or post-transaction approval is held beyond the itemised receipt. For £435.55 of public hospitality, that is not a minor missing garnish. That is the plate, the cutlery, the table and possibly the waiter.

So the story now looks like this. Lulivo has a purpose but no itemised lunch receipt. Sotirios has a credible tenant-engagement explanation but muddy recording around policy and drinks. Three’s A Crowd has named attendees, no itemised bill, a per-head cost far above normal subsistence figures, and a magnificent cameo as transport spending. The Britannia looks modest per head but apparently lacks the wider approval record. It is audit tapas: tiny portions of explanation, served slowly, with the important bits arriving after everyone has gone home.

No one sensible wants officers eating gruel, councillors attending conferences with emergency crackers in their pockets, or tenant volunteers being thanked with a photocopied smile. Public servants can eat. Civic guests can be hosted. Meetings happen. But public money is not a contactless picnic blanket. It needs receipts, approvals, correct codes and straight answers. If dinner can become car parking, lunch can catch a train, and fish and chips can travel without the wider approval trail being held, FHDC shouldn’t be surprised when residents look at the bill and ask whether the finance system has been left alone with the dessert trolley.

Seen something the public should know about? Send tips, documents or concerns to TheShepwayVoxTeam(at)proton(dot)me. You can contact us in confidence, speak off the record in the first instance, and help us follow the evidence where it leads.

The Shepway Vox Team

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