Folkestone Footfall Data: FHDC’s Own Figures Show Visits Peaked in 2023

Folkestone & Hythe District Council says Folkestone’s town centre grew beyond the national trend, reached a five-year footfall peak in 2024 and then settled into a resilient, year-round economy. The arithmetic behind its headline totals is broadly right. The story wrapped around them is wearing rose-tinted glasses and humming a tune called “optimism bias”.

For starters, the data doesn’t cover Folkestone town centre as most residents, councillors or traders would understand it. FHDC’s map shows a tracked corridor along Sandgate Road from the former Debenhams building to the Town Hall, together with Guildhall Street. It doesn’t include the harbour, seafront, wider Creative Quarter, Old High Street, every side street or all the routes people use around town.

It’s an important shopping strip, certainly. It isn’t the whole shooting match, and a movement count through that corridor can’t carry the weight of the entire town-centre economy.

There’s also a crucial distinction inside the spreadsheet. FHDC separates “Total Footfall”, “Total Visiting” and “Passing Through”. Someone moving through the geofenced area isn’t necessarily a shopper, and somebody classed as visiting isn’t necessarily entering an independent business or spending a penny.

Then comes the first loose floorboard.

In 2021, 2022 and 2023, the workbook records no passing-through traffic from January to April; that category begins in May. In 2024 and 2025 it begins in February. The council says the system was recalibrated to capture broader passing traffic earlier, so the apparent spring surge isn’t a clean comparison.

Between February and April 2024, the headline total includes 326,017 passing-through movements absent from the same months of earlier years. Total Footfall appears to rise by 30.3% against 2023, yet Total Visiting actually falls from 926,677 to 881,386. The surge is partly the result of changing what went into the bucket.

The fairest common window is May to December, because all five years contain passing-through data for those months. Total Footfall rises from 3.024 million in 2021 to 3.244 million in 2022 and peaks at 3.325 million in 2023. It then falls to 3.145 million in 2024 and 2.854 million in 2025.

That’s a 5.4% fall in 2024 followed by another 9.2% fall in 2025. Strip away the early-year inconsistency and the supposed 2024 peak disappears.

The full-year headline produces a different picture because it includes every passing-through count. Total Footfall rises from 4.559 million in 2023 to 4.641 million in 2024, an increase of about 1.8%, before falling to 4.273 million in 2025.

But Total Visiting peaks at 3.697 million in 2023, falls to 3.493 million in 2024 and drops again to 3.160 million in 2025—a fall of roughly 14.5% from the peak. Passing Through, meanwhile, jumps from 862,609 in 2023 to 1.148 million in 2024. The broad total reaches its record while the number classed as visiting goes backwards.

That distinction goes to the heart of FHDC’s claim that Folkestone’s “local core is heavily outperforming” the rest of the country. The optimistic reading works only if the council selects its broadest 2024 measure and leaves the visiting and like-for-like figures sitting quietly in the basement of the civic centre.

In 2024, the headline total rises by 1.8%, but Total Visiting falls by 5.5% and May-to-December footfall falls by 5.4%. In 2025 all three measures head south: headline footfall by 7.9%, Total Visiting by 9.5% and May-to-December footfall by 9.2%. FHDC’s own workbook doesn’t support a blanket claim of heavy outperformance.

The national backdrop was undeniably weak. British Retail Consortium-Sensormatic figures show total UK retail footfall fell by 2.2% in 2024 and another 0.8% in 2025. Folkestone therefore beats that benchmark in 2024 only on its broad headline measure. On the council’s visiting measure and the cleaner May-to-December comparison, Folkestone performs markedly worse. In 2025, it performs worse on all three.

Even that comparison needs a health warning. The BRC monitor measures retail locations, while FHDC’s information comes from a mobile-location geofence around a particular corridor. One measures retail footfall across recognised shopping environments; the other estimates movement through a defined patch of Folkestone. They aren’t automatically apples with apples.

The ONS comparison is no silver bullet either. Its newer BT Active Intelligence series is classed as official statistics in development, begins only in July 2024 and isn’t yet long enough for seasonal adjustment. Unless FHDC publishes the exact index, location category, time period and calculation used, invoking “ONS indices” proves very little.

Huq’s methodology says the information begins with anonymised geolocation signals collected through software embedded in mobile applications. Home locations are inferred and the sample is scaled against geographical and demographic benchmarks. That can provide useful evidence of movement, but it remains modelled mobility data, not people clicking through a turnstile.

It can’t tell FHDC whether somebody entered a shop, bought a coffee, booked a haircut or walked straight through without opening their wallet.

Huq offers a separate Experian Spend Insights layer using anonymised card data to connect footfall with transactions. FHDC’s methodology paper says that product isn’t included in its subscription. The council can estimate movement, but its dataset doesn’t show how much was spent, where it was spent or which traders benefited.

Footfall counts movement. It doesn’t count money.

An earlier FHDC visitor report got closer to useful commercial behaviour by tracking dwell time and indoor locations visited. For February 2021 it reported 2.2 places visited per trip, down from 2.7 a year earlier. That still wouldn’t reveal takings, but it looked beyond bodies crossing a digital boundary.

FHDC’s 2024 tourism report estimates Folkestone Town generated £190.7 million in tourism value, but that’s a Cambridge Model estimate assembled from surveys, local information and third-party sources—not an audited cash-up from Sandgate Road and Guildhall Street. The report itself warns that changing survey methods make genuine shifts difficult to separate from methodological change.

The council’s new Town Centre Operating Model (TCOM) makes this missing link harder to shrug off. TCOM is intended to move FHDC from reactive facilitator to proactive manager, using outsourced market operators, easier pop-up approvals, a unified events calendar and a Town Centre Manager to generate “dynamic activation and consistent footfall” around the Folkestone A Brighter Future works.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. New events, better coordination and fewer bureaucratic hoops could help traders. Officers said even a small event can face an eight-to-12-week process, while use of Sandgate Road and Guildhall Street also requires KCC permission. A single point of contact may cut through some of that red tape.

But the council’s own words puncture the idea that the town centre has already become a settled, resilient success. Officers at the Overview & Scrutiny Committee on 26 May, told councillors that capital works would create an inviting space, but Folkestone still needed “a reason for people to come”. They also acknowledged repeated feedback from Guildhall Street businesses that they felt “unloved” and “left out”.

The formal report says TCOM builds on the “proven data and success” of six Folke About Town pilot events. Yet when Cllr Bridget Chapman asked how that success had been assessed and requested the evidence, the committee was told it would be supplied later. The written report states that no background documents were relied upon. “Proven” is doing heavy lifting when the proof wasn’t in the room.

Nor is delivery nailed down. The Town Centre Manager is initially a three-day-a-week role, expected to work flexibly and at weekends. Asked whether that was sufficient, an officer replied: “Honestly? We don’t know.” Only one operator had expressed an interest, with council-led pilot events the fallback if more couldn’t be secured.

The first two years are externally funded and the model is supposed to become self-financing from year three through operator fees and commercial activity. FHDC rates delayed recruitment of operators as a high-likelihood risk and failure to meet year-three financial projections as a medium-likelihood, high-impact risk. The self-sustaining finish line is an ambition, not money safely in the bank.

Most importantly, councillors asked the right question: what does success mean? Cllr Abena Akuffo-Kelly asked whether it would be footfall, visitor numbers, traders’ earnings or all three. The response referred to performance indicators for the Town Centre Manager, but no finished project-level framework was produced. The scheme wants more movement before the council has defined how it will prove that movement helped existing businesses.

The report even says a communications plan should ensure funding sources and the project’s “positive elements” are clearly presented from the outset. Positive communication has its place, but it mustn’t get ahead of the evidence—as the footfall narrative already has.

FHDC should publish the definitions of visiting and passing through, dwell-time threshold, treatment of repeat devices, confidence ranges, recalibration history and exact national comparators. TCOM needs public baselines and targets for shop entry, paying customers, trader takings, empty units, dwell time, repeat visits, costs and event-by-event results—not merely another rising line marked “footfall”.

Independent traders should be surveyed repeatedly using the same seven questions, reporting period and business categories. That would test the chain the council’s dashboard skips: people in the street, people through doors, people buying and money in the till.

The data isn’t useless. It shows estimated movement through a defined corridor and can help identify changing patterns. What it doesn’t prove is that visits peaked in 2024, that Folkestone’s whole town centre heavily outperformed, or that independent traders benefited because more mobile devices crossed a digital boundary. Until FHDC measures commerce alongside movement, its conclusion remains a shop window without a stockroom: smart enough from the pavement, but pretty bare once you step inside.

The Shepway Vox Team

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