KCC’s £22.7m Overspend Punctures Reform’s Waste-Cutting Promise

The Tories set Kent County Council’s 2025/26 budget in February, before they lost office. Reform has run KCC since May 2025. By the end of March, the council was £22.7m over budget and Cabinet was being asked to raid the piggy bank to make the year balance. That doesn’t make every cost Reform’s fault. It does mean the inherited budget wasn’t kept in budget.

County Hall calls this it’s Revenue and Capital Budget Monitoring Report – Outturn 2025/26, which is a mouthful that only a finance report could love. For the rest of us, it means this: KCC counted what it planned to spend, counted what it actually spent, and found the two numbers didn’t match. Not by a fiver. Not by the price of a school dinner. By £22.7m.

If numbers have never been your big thing, like Cllr David Wimble’s,  think of it like this: the council had a spending limit, went over it, and now wants to use its piggy bank cash to make the numbers add up. The official figures are £1.5319bn budgeted, £1.5534bn spent, £21.6m over before roll-forwards, and £22.7m over after them.

The piggy bank matters. KCC’s own report says overspends are a concern because drawing from reserves weakens the council’s finances and means the money has to be put back later. Spend your secret stash of pocket money today, and you’ve got less stash tomorrow. Even a ten-year-old knows that isn’t a magic trick. It’s just having less money left to spend on sweeties.

Now, nobody sensible should pretend Reform made this whole mess from scratch. It didn’t. The Conservative-run council had already agreed the 2025/26 budget and council tax rise before the May election. Adult social care was already expensive. SEND was already straining. School transport was already the sort of budget line that makes grown adults stare into their tea. Reform inherited a difficult budget. That part is true.

But taking over a council is not like finding someone else’s packed lunch on a bench. You don’t get to nibble the crisps, eat the sandwich, issue a press release about better lunchtime management, and then say the empty packet has nothing to do with you. Reform won in May 2025, and Linden Kemkaran (pictured) said Kent would “flourish under our stewardship”. She also said Reform would put “the people of Kent at the heart of everything we do”.

Fine words.

The problem is that bills do not care about fine words. They arrive anyway. In this case, the adult social care bill arrived with bouncers in tow. Adult Social Care & Health had a £701.6m budget and a £744.5m outturn. That is £42.9m over. Nearly half of that overspend, £20.7m, came from savings that were not achieved during the year. Another £22.2m came from other service pressures.

Care is not a joke. Older people need residential care. Disabled adults need support. Vulnerable people do not disappear because a spreadsheet would prefer them to. So the point is not that KCC should simply slash care and clap itself on the back. The point is that if the council sets a care budget, and the care bill comes in £42.9m higher, then the budget has failed to describe the real world closely enough.

Look at older people’s care. Residential Care Services were £25.4m over budget. Community Based Services were £17.5m over. That is not the cost of a few extra biscuits at a consultation event. It’s real pressure in real services, and it dwarfs the sort of petty savings that sometimes get waved around as proof that County Hall has suddenly discovered thrift.

Then there is DOLGE, Reform’s Department for Local Government Efficiency. Brian Collins, KCC’s Deputy Leader and finance lead, said in August: “Our priority is to achieve financial stability.” He said DOLGE had been working “since day one in May”, and that “every nook and cranny is being investigated” to find waste and different ways of working. Well, the nooks may have been inspected. The crannies may have had a torch shone into them. The council still ended up £22.7m over budget.

To be fair, KCC did tighten some controls. Recruitment needed higher approval. Requisitions were checked. Managers who wanted agency staff beyond three months had to make a business case. That helped improve the outturn by just under £14m compared with Quarter 3. Good. But a smaller overspend is still an overspend. If you planned to fall in the pond and only fell in the shallow end, you are still wet.

The savings table is where the shiny talk starts to scuff. KCC needed £121.5m of savings and extra income in 2025/26. It delivered £98.6m. So £22.9m did not arrive, and £13.3m has been rolled into the next year’s budget. If a child says, “I’ve done my homework,” and then adds, “well, most of it, and I’ll do the rest next term,” you know exactly how finished it is.

This is why council language needs watching like a dog near sausages. A saving should mean money you do not need to spend again. Done. Banked. Real. But County halls have a habit of letting very different things sit under the same umbrella: money actually saved, money delayed, money hoped for, money moved between pots, and money that exists because someone in finance has been optimistic in 10-point Arial.

There is an old rule of public money that should be painted on the wall of every finance office: “every single pound wasted means one pound not spent on actually delivering services.” That’s the bit children understand before adults start inventing job titles for it. Waste is not abstract. It is the pothole not filled, the care package delayed, the child waiting for help, the bus that does not turn up.

Take Oracle Cloud. KCC’s savings appendix records £8.021m from the flexible use of capital receipts for eligible Oracle Cloud costs. In ordinary English, that means KCC used rules that allow money from selling assets to pay for certain change projects, if those projects are meant to reduce costs, raise income or make services more efficient. That may be lawful. It may turn out to be sensible. But it is not the same as finding a wasteful yearly bill and cutting it for good.

There is a difference between saving pocket money and selling your old bike to buy a better school bag. The second may be sensible. You may really need the bag. It may stop your books falling into puddles. But you cannot keep selling the same bike every year. Asset-sale money is not a never-ending sweet jar. Once the asset is gone, it is gone.

The wider outturn papers show £15.021m of capitalised transformation costs. They do not give a neat pound-for-pound trail between every asset sale and every transformation cost, so we should not pretend they do. There is no need. The real point is clear enough: the same financial year involved missed savings, reserve use, transformation spending and capital receipts. That is not a clean little tale of “we found waste and fixed everything”.

Schools bring another large brown envelope to the headteacher’s desk. Schools’ Delegated Budgets overspent by £33m. The Dedicated Schools Grant was £61.8m over. The High Needs Block was £64.6m over. The central schools reserve ended with a £130.5m deficit. Accounting rules put that in a separate box for now, but a separate box is still a box with a problem inside it.

The capital programme has its own little disappearing act. KCC had a General Fund capital programme of £378.8m and spent £260.8m, plus schools and PFI spending. The papers show a £105.8m underspend. Hooray, you might think, until you read that most of it is rephasing. That means work has slipped into later years. If your bedroom ceiling leaks and your mum says the repair has been “rephased”, you are still sleeping under a bucket.

There were better bits, and they deserve saying because the truth is rarely tidy. Some directorates underspent. Growth, Environment & Transport, the Chief Executive’s Department, the Deputy Chief Executive’s Department and Non Attributable Costs helped reduce the final position. Children, Young People & Education ended only £1.1m over after roll-forwards, with Home to School Transport offsetting some looked-after children placement pressure. So no, this was not every part of KCC setting fire to its homework at once.

But the total still matters. £22.7m over. Funded from reserves. General reserves below 5% of the net revenue budget after funding the overspend. Savings short. Adult social care badly over. Schools carrying a huge DSG deficit. Capital work pushed into later years. You can put those figures in a tidy table if you like. A tidy table does not tidy the problem.

This is not a party-political nursery rhyme. The Tories did not leave a perfect budget tied up with ribbon. Reform did not invent every pressure. Social care and SEND are the big beasts of county council finance, and they were already pacing around the cage when power changed hands.

But Reform has run KCC since May 2025. It promised “financial stability.”. It promised waste-hunting. It promised DOLGE. It promised residents would sit at the heart of decisions. Then the Revenue and Capital Budget Monitoring Report for Outturn 2025-26 arrived with £22.7m to be taken from the piggy bank.

That’s the story.

The former Tory administration set the budget before it lost office. Reform inherited it. Reform did not keep it in budget. Not every pressure is Reform’s fault, but the failure to bring the year back inside the line now sits on Reform’s record. That may be uncomfortable. It’s also fair.

If numbers have never been your big thing, keep one picture in your head. County Hall had a spending limit. It went over it. It now wants piggy bank cash to make the year balance. And after all the talk of nooks, crannies and efficiency, residents are entitled to ask why the piggy bank is being opened at all.

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