Child Poverty Falls in Folkestone & Hythe, But Housing Costs Keep Thousands Poor

Child poverty has fallen in Folkestone & Hythe in the latest figures. That is the good news. The harder truth is that the district remains one of Kent’s highest child-poverty areas, and in the Folkestone and Hythe constituency the count rises to 4,540 children once housing costs are included.

A child does not experience poverty as a DWP table, a Commons Library spreadsheet or a neat percentage point. They experience it as the school trip that does not happen, the uniform that has to last, the food shop that runs out too soon, and the parent looking at the rent before looking at anything else. The latest data shows improvement, but not escape. In Folkestone & Hythe District, 3,451 children under 16 were in relative low-income families in 2024/25, equal to 18.7% of the district’s children. That is down from 3,529 and 19.2% the previous year, but still above Kent, above the South East, and still among the higher rates in Kent and Medway.

First, the geography needs care. Folkestone & Hythe District Council is not exactly the same as the Folkestone and Hythe parliamentary constituency. North Downs East and North Downs West now sit in the Ashford parliamentary constituency for Westminster elections, while Folkestone & Hythe District Council still provides district services and collects council tax there. So the district data and the constituency data tell connected, but not identical, stories.

On the district measure, the latest year is clearly down. Folkestone & Hythe’s relative low-income child count went from 3,529 in 2023/24 to 3,451 in 2024/25, a fall of 78 children, or 2.2%. The rate fell from 19.2% to 18.7%. But the longer short-series picture is more awkward: in 2021/22 the rate was 18.3% and the count was 3,319. So the latest annual direction is better, but the district has not returned to where it was at the start of the revised 2021/22 series.

Against Kent and Medway, Folkestone & Hythe remains uncomfortably high. Thanet records 22.6%, Dover 20.4%, Folkestone & Hythe 18.7%, Gravesham 18.4%, Swale 17.6% and Medway 17.4%. In other words, Folkestone & Hythe sits third among the Kent and Medway local authority areas in the 2024/25 Kent Analytics table. It is not the worst, but it is firmly in the wrong part of the league table.

The parliamentary constituency data adds another layer. For Folkestone and Hythe, relative child poverty before housing costs rose from 2,964 children in 2021/22 to 3,161 in 2022/23, then fell slightly to 3,155 in 2023/24 and again to 3,077 in 2024/25. So this is not the first fall. It is the second consecutive annual fall on that measure. But the 2024/25 figure remains above the 2021/22 starting point.

The absolute poverty measure before housing costs moved differently. In the constituency, it rose from 3,111 children in 2021/22 to 3,439 in 2022/23 and 3,454 in 2023/24, before falling to 3,077 in 2024/25. So yes, both relative and absolute poverty fell in the latest year. But relative poverty had already started falling in 2023/24; absolute poverty did not fall until 2024/25.

The difference between relative and absolute poverty matters because they answer different questions. Relative poverty means a household’s income is below 60% of the current median household income; put simply, it tells us how far poorer families sit behind the middle of society now. Absolute poverty means income is below 60% of the 2024/25 median income, adjusted for inflation when used across time; it is meant to show whether low-income living standards are improving or worsening. In 2024/25 only, the two figures are identical because both use the 2024/25 median-income poverty line.

Housing costs then change the story again. The Commons Library provides relative poverty after housing costs from 2023/24. In the Folkestone and Hythe constituency, that figure fell from 4,713 children in 2023/24 to 4,540 in 2024/25. That is a fall of 173 children. But the 2024/25 after-housing-costs figure is still far higher than the before-housing-costs figure of 3,077. The rent, mortgage interest, water rates, service charges and similar housing costs add 1,463 children to the local poverty count.

That is the public-interest heart of the story. Before housing costs, the constituency rate is 20.1%. After housing costs, it is 29.7%. In normal language, the first figure is roughly one in five children. The second is close to three in ten. Poverty statistics often become more brutal once the roof over a family’s head has been paid for.

The working-family numbers should kill one lazy myth stone dead. In 2024/25, 3,133 of the 4,540 children in relative poverty after housing costs in the Folkestone and Hythe constituency were in working families. That is 69.0%. Before housing costs, 1,985 of the 3,077 children were in working families. So this is not simply a story of worklessness. Work is present in most of these households. The money still does not stretch far enough.

The Shepway Vox Team has been reporting this for years. In 2020, we wrote that more than 3,000 children under 16 were living in poverty in Folkestone & Hythe District and that poverty had risen for the fifth year in a row. In 2025, we reported that Folkestone & Hythe and Thanet were joint second in Kent and Medway for the rise in child poverty across the period then examined. In March 2026, we returned to the wider poverty crisis, food parcels, child poverty and fuel poverty. The new figures do not create the story. They update it.

Kent Analytics’ ward tables show why “the district” is too blunt a phrase. Six of Folkestone & Hythe’s 13 wards sit in the highest 20% of Kent wards for relative low-income families. Walland & Denge Marsh appears in Kent’s top ten by percentage, with 370 children and a 29.0% rate. East Folkestone appears in Kent’s top ten by count, with 605 children and a 24.5% rate. This is not a vague local condition. It has places attached.

None of this means Folkestone & Hythe District Council can solve child poverty on its own. It cannot set Universal Credit, child benefit, national wages, national tax thresholds or private-sector rent levels. But it is not a spectator. It has influence over homelessness prevention, temporary accommodation, council tax collection, discretionary support, private housing enforcement, planning, affordable housing and how hard it chooses to press Kent County Council and central government.

The local test is simple. If the data shows child poverty concentrated in places such as East Folkestone, Walland & Denge Marsh and other hard-pressed neighbourhoods, future council reports should stop talking as though hardship is evenly sprinkled across the map. It is not. Advice, enforcement, housing policy and anti-poverty work should follow the evidence.

The spreadsheet gives us the numbers. It does not show the child walking into school hungry, the parent hiding the final demand, or the family watching the rent eat the week before the week has started. That is the human reporting still to do. But the accountability question is already clear: now the data shows where child poverty remains deepest, who locally is going to act as though they have seen it?

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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