Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s HR reports between 21/22 – 25/26 read like a match of two halves. The Conservatives left the pitch with a governance mess behind them. The Greens came on after May 2023 promising a different game. But the latest scoreboard shows sickness, stress and long-term absence heading the wrong way again.
Kick-off: the political whistle blew in May 2023
FHDC changed political colour after the May 2023 district elections. The council published the election results, and later that month announced a new cabinet led by Green councillor Jim Martin. It wasn’t a Green majority council, but it was, plainly, a Green-led administration. From that point, the Greens weren’t watching from the stands. They were on the pitch.
The match report is simple enough. In the final full HR year before the Greens took over, 2022/23, FHDC recorded 6.5 sick days per employee, 2.8% of working time lost, 1,317 long-term sickness days, and 27% of sickness time lost to “stress, depression, anxiety, mental health, fatigue”. In the latest Green-led HR year, 2025/26, those numbers were 7.88 sick days, 3.49% working time lost, 2,434 long-term sickness days, and 42% in that stress and mental health category. That’s not a marginal refereeing decision. That’s the scoreboard.
First half: the Conservatives left a mess
The old Tory-led side didn’t stroll off at half-time with clean shorts. The 2022/23 HR report recorded 16 disciplinary cases, “extremely complex and high profile disciplinary investigations”, HR and Internal Audit working together, two cases taking more than six months, and six employees resigning before investigations finished or before formal hearings could be convened. That was a proper governance stink, not a bit of mud on the boots.
Then came the council’s “Getting it Right” training. Staff were put through sessions on declarations, contract management, compliance with the officer code of conduct and financial procedures. Including agency workers, 480 staff were invited, and 437 had attended by the time the report was written. That tells its own story. You don’t send almost the whole club back to basics unless something has gone badly wrong on the training ground.
So yes, the Greens inherited trouble.
But football doesn’t stop at half-time.
Half-time score: bad inheritance, worse later numbers
The Conservatives left behind a council with HR and governance problems; the Greens then inherited the ball, the strip, the fixture list and the crowd’s expectations. But three years in and the the excuses are wearing thin, because the latest HR figures are no longer simply about what had been left in the changing room. They’re about what happened after the new management took charge.
In 2021/22 and 2022/23, sickness absence was 6.5 days per employee in both years. In 2023/24, the politically mixed year, it rose to 7 days. In 2024/25, it fell to 6.27 days, a brief spell of tidy passing. Then 2025/26 came in at 7.88 days, the highest figure in the five HR reviews examined and the highest point shown on FHDC’s own long-running chart since 2016/17. That isn’t a comeback. That’s conceding late.
The working-time-lost figure follows the same run of play. FHDC recorded 2.8% in 2021/22 and 2.8% again in 2022/23. It then went to 3.07% in 2023/24, 2.77% in 2024/25, and 3.49% in 2025/26. The latest full-year figure is the freshest result under the Green-led administration, and it’s not one for the trophy cabinet.
Second half: long-term sickness changes the game
Long-term sickness is the second-half collapse.
In 2022/23, FHDC lost 1,317 working days to long-term sickness. In 2023/24, that rose to 1,735.5 days. In 2024/25, it dropped to 1,461 days. Then, in 2025/26, it surged to 2,434 days. That’s about 67% higher than the year before. It’s also the worst long-term sickness figure in the five-year set. A council can spin a dip. It can’t spin the ball hitting the back of its own net.
The 2025/26 report makes the damage clearer. Long-term absences were only 7.7% of absence instances, but accounted for 68% of all sickness time lost. That’s the real stat. This isn’t mainly about the odd cold, bug or bad stomach. It’s longer, heavier absences doing most of the damage, and that raises harder questions about pressure, workload, management and whether staff are being kept well enough to stay in the game.
There’s one fair point for FHDC. Short-term sickness has improved. The 2025/26 table shows short-term days lost falling from 1,717 in 2022/23, to 1,467.5 in 2023/24, to 1,348 in 2024/25, then to 1,141 in 2025/26. The council says short-term sickness has reduced for a third year in a row. That’s true. But long-term sickness has gone the other way and swallowed the match.
Stress: the injury list FHDC can’t hide
Stress is where the Green-led council has its ugliest second-half statistic. In 2022/23, 27% of working time lost to sickness was classed as “stress, depression, anxiety, mental health, fatigue”. In 2024/25, after a full Green-led HR year, it was 45%. In 2025/26, it was still 42%. Across the two full Green-led HR years, the average was 43.5%, compared with 30.5% across the two pre-Green HR years. That’s not a slight knock. That’s a player going down and the management bench pretending not to see.
FHDC will point to the national picture. Public sector sickness is high. Mental health absence isn’t unique to Folkestone and Hythe. The pandemic has bent workforce data out of shape. All true. But national context doesn’t wipe the mud off the local shirt. These are FHDC staff, FHDC services, FHDC managers, FHDC reports, and since May 2023, a Green-led FHDC.
The council’s response is a long substitutes’ bench of wellbeing activity: mental health first aiders, resilience sessions, meditation, mindful painting, menopause cafés, financial wellbeing, staff briefings, quizzes, chill-out space and counselling access. Some of that will help some staff, and fair enough. But support is only worth bragging about if the numbers improve. These numbers haven’t.
That’s the gap between the programme notes and the final score. FHDC can list wellbeing schemes until the cows come home, but 2,434 long-term sickness days and 42% of sickness time lost to stress, depression, anxiety, mental health and fatigue don’t look like a workforce problem under control. It looks like putting a fresh coat of paint on a cracked stand.
Discipline: almost back to the old crisis scoreline
The disciplinary figures are awkward for both sides, but the Greens don’t get a clean sheet. After the 2022/23 spike of 16 disciplinary cases, the figure fell to 7 in 2023/24 and 8 in 2024/25. Then it shot back up to 15 in 2025/26. That’s not steady improvement. That’s the opposition breaking through again in the second half.
The 2025/26 casework list is not pretty reading. It includes 2 verbal warnings, 8 first written warnings, 1 final written warning, 3 staff leaving before the disciplinary process concluded, 1 ongoing disciplinary case, 2 formal capability cases, 1 dismissal for poor performance, 1 failed probation dismissal, and 2 long-term sickness hearings, both ending in dismissal. That sounds less like a settled squad and more like a dressing room where the manager has lost the room.
VAR check: the reports themselves are loose
The 2023/24 report appears to trip over its own comparison with 2022/23. It refers to the 16 disciplinary cases from 2022/23, then appears to insert a line about 2 capability cases from the wrong year, before separately saying there were 0 formal capability cases in 2022/23. The actual 2022/23 report says 0 formal capability cases. That may be a drafting muddle, but it matters. If councillors are meant to rely on these papers, the baseline shouldn’t be wobbling like a pub table.
The 2025/26 Local Government Reform section has an even stranger moment. It says decisions are expected from central government in July 2026, but then says work will continue to prepare for transition to vesting day in April 2026. Time doesn’t run backwards, not even at FHDC. Maybe it should say April 2027. Maybe something else was meant. Either way, in a section dealing with job descriptions, signed contracts, payroll hierarchy, personnel files, redundancy calculations, pension strain and possible TUPE transfer, that’s an own goal in the paperwork.
The legal and equality wording is another soft spot. The 2022/23 report says there are no legal implications and no specific diversity and equality implications arising from the report, despite discussing sickness, stress, mental ill health, redeployment, capability and staff wellbeing. By 2025/26, the legal comments finally say absence management and wellbeing initiatives help with service resilience and compliance with employee health and wellbeing duties, including Equality Act 2010 obligations around disabilities and reasonable adjustments. The later honesty makes the earlier blandness look like a defensive clearance into Row Z.
The crowd: staff engagement isn’t the win FHDC thinks it is
FHDC’s best defence is staff engagement. The 2025 survey had a 55% response rate, and the Employee Net Promoter Score rose from +29 to +38. The report even says this puts FHDC on a par with big names such as Google and Netflix. But the lowest-scoring question was optimism about Local Government Reform: 36% optimistic, 41% neutral and 23% pessimistic. Nearly half the workforce didn’t answer at all. That’s not a terrace bouncing with confidence. That’s a crowd waiting to see which way the game turns.
The previous survey was harder to dress up. The 2024 engagement survey had a 43% response rate, and FHDC still said it was pleased with the results, especially after a restructure involving redundancies. A survey most staff didn’t answer can still be useful, but it’s not a love letter from the whole workforce. It’s like asking one stand for the score and ignoring the other three.
Final minutes: scrutiny goes missing
Each HR annual review goes to Personnel Committee with the same soft landing: receive and note. Not demand a service-by-service breakdown of stress absence. Not ask for raw staff survey comments. Not require exit interview themes, occupational health trends, repeat-manager patterns, grievance confidence data, or a recovery plan with named owners and dates. Just receive and note. That isn’t scrutiny with studs showing. It’s a polite handshake after conceding three.
Local Government Reform now hangs over the workforce like a dark cloud over an away day in February. The 2025/26 report says HR is checking job descriptions, signed contracts, contractual variations, establishment hierarchy, personnel files, DBS records, policy lists, redundancy calculations, pension strain costs, part-time hours and flexible working records. That may all be necessary. It’s also a stress factory, and it’s being bolted onto a workforce already showing serious long-term sickness and mental-health absence pressure.
Full-time score
The full-time score is brutal because it’s simple. Final full pre-Green HR year, 2022/23: 6.5 sick days per employee, 2.8% working time lost, 1,317 long-term sickness days, and 27% of sickness time lost to stress, depression, anxiety, mental health and fatigue. Latest Green-led HR year, 2025/26: 7.88 sick days, 3.49% working time lost, 2,434 long-term sickness days, and 42% in that stress and mental health category. That’s the scoreline FHDC won’t want on the big screen.
So no, these reports don’t prove, as a legal fact, that FHDC is a toxic workplace. The evidence doesn’t go that far. What they do show is sharper and politically harder to shrug off: the Conservatives left a mess, the Greens inherited it, and under the Green-led administration the council’s own HR numbers now show worse sickness, worse long-term absence, a heavier stress and mental-health burden, and disciplinary pressure back near the old peak. The Tories left the pitch with the changing room in a state. The Greens came out for the second half. Now the scoreboard is theirs.
The Shepway Vox Team
Dissent is NOT a Crime
