Folkestone & Hythe District Council says Folkestone – A Brighter Future is now “80% complete”. It’s a neat little figure, polished until it shines: the sort of percentage meant to suggest the builders are on the home straight, the snagging list is down to a few odds and sods and somebody ought to start looking for the ribbon and oversized scissors.
Take off the rose-tinted spectacles and the picture isn’t nearly so rosy. The foundations for the Guildhall Street footbridge are still being built, the bridge itself isn’t due to be installed until September, granite paving and benches are still going into Bouverie Square, and the council still hasn’t published one firm, consistent date for the whole scheme to be finished.
The main construction works began on 7 April 2025. The entire programme had been due to finish on 31 March 2025. In other words, the diggers turned up a week after the original finishing line had already been crossed, the bunting taken down and the stopwatch put back in the drawer.
That’s not a minor diary wobble. It’s a timetable failure in plain sight.
By the date printed on the council’s latest portfolio report — 26 July 2026 — the scheme will already be 482 days late. Even on the most generous reading, installing the footbridge on 1 September would push the overrun to at least 519 days, or 17 months and one day. If it doesn’t go in until 30 September, the delay reaches 548 days — exactly 18 months. Nor would installation mark the end of the job: final surfacing, finishing works, inspections, handover and removal of the contractor’s compound would still have to follow, while FHDC papers indicate the programme could drift into 2027. The finishing line hasn’t merely moved; it may now have slipped into another calendar year.
The promise, before the goalposts began moving
The original timetable wasn’t vague, woolly or written in disappearing ink. FHDC’s August 2022 Levelling Up Fund bid said a KCC-led highways contractor would be appointed in July 2023. Folca’s first separation works were to finish in March 2023 and its refurbishment in June 2023. Station Approach was due by December 2023; Cheriton Road, Cheriton Gardens, Middelburg Square and Shellons Street by June 2024; Sandgate Road and Guildhall Street by September 2024; and the station arrival area and Bouverie Square by December 2024.
The whole lot was meant to be done by March 2025.
Nor can those dates now be brushed off as an early wish list dreamt up before anybody had considered what might go wrong. The bid identified the tight programme, utility diversions, inflation, material shortages, land complications, traffic orders and the need to move the bus station before Bouverie Square could be rebuilt. It said three months had already been allowed at the end “for slippage”, while a 15% construction contingency was intended to help absorb cost movements and design or delivery risks. The rainy-day allowance wasn’t forgotten; it was baked into the cake from the start.
The scheme was also handed to Kent County Council for a reason. KCC’s January 2023 decision papers said it would act as delivery partner for the transport and public-realm elements, commission detailed design and surveys, enter the necessary agreements and award the construction contract. The alternative — leaving FHDC to manage the highways work — was rejected partly because the grant timescale would make delivery difficult and would create reputational risk. KCC was supposed to bring greater control, highways know-how and the ability to crack on.
The formal record of decision was signed on 20 January 2023 and took effect on 28 January. It authorised KCC to become the delivery partner and gave senior officers broad powers to progress the design, agreements and construction contract. This wasn’t an informal handshake over a cup of tea; the governance machinery was switched on more than two years before the main works finally started.
The accompanying report went further. It said KCC would have “greater control” over implementation, could ensure the materials and works met its standards and would avoid creating a future maintenance liability. It also said there would be no KCC capital or revenue funding required, that KCC officer time and costs would be charged to the project, and that FHDC — as accountable body — would be responsible for any cost overruns. That last sentence matters rather more now than it did when the ink was fresh.
So what happened next?
FHDC’s own archived timeline shows that AECOM was appointed as infrastructure consultant in February 2023, the first public engagement took place in July, a second round followed in November, more than 500 people attended the third round in March 2024 and ground investigations were completed in April 2024. Engagement and proper investigation are necessary, of course, but the chronology exposes the mismatch: while the original bid said Station Approach should be finished by December 2023 and several other areas by June 2024, the project was still consulting, refining and investigating.
The warning lights were already flashing amber.
The archived public-engagement page is even more revealing. It said another event was planned for autumn 2024, when “the first work is due to start”, and that the event would unveil the full detailed plans and construction schedule. By then the original bid said Station Approach should have been finished for roughly nine months, Cheriton Road, Cheriton Gardens, Middelburg Square and Shellons Street for roughly three months, and Sandgate Road and Guildhall Street should be reaching completion. The baseline had quietly gone out of the window before the contractor reached the site.
Even that revised autumn 2024 start didn’t happen.
By spring 2025, KCC’s public timetable had been rewritten again: tendering in summer 2024, assessment and award in early 2025, construction starting in April 2025 and finishing in summer 2026. That was no longer the original Levelling Up programme; it was the replacement timetable after the first one had already gone pear shaped.
An archived FHDC project page captured on 29 March 2025 — two days before the original completion deadline — still described much of the scheme in the future tense. The bus station “is to be replaced” by a park, new bus stops “will” be created, a new footbridge was listed among the highway works and the public-realm changes were still being presented as improvements to come. The webpage was selling tomorrow while the original timetable said tomorrow should already have arrived.
The council then held an event on 4 and 5 April 2025 to share the “final designs”. Work began on 7 April. There’s nothing wrong with showing the public final drawings, but doing so after the original completion date rather neatly sums up the gulf between the bid programme and the job that eventually reached the ground.
Consultation didn’t cause every delay, and it would be cheap to pretend otherwise. Designs changed, buried services had to be located, statutory traffic processes had to be followed and utility companies don’t always dance to a council’s tune. But explanations aren’t an eraser. The public was given specific milestones, an express slippage allowance and assurances that KCC’s experienced team would prioritise delivery. Those promises remain the proper yardstick.
Eighty per cent of what, exactly?
The current project pages don’t read like a scheme with one foot over the finishing line. Phase 1 is complete, but phases 2, 3 and 4 are all labelled “currently underway”, while Phase 5 is described as the final stage rather than a completed one. The Phase 2 page still marks some Middelburg Square, Sandgate Road and Shellons Street work as incomplete or in progress; Phase 3 continues into 2026; and Phase 4 includes Bouverie Square and the shared foot-and-cycle bridge.
Jackson Civil Engineering’s Issue 13 newsletter said the scheme was “more than 70% complete”, then set out a list of work that was anything but window dressing. Station Approach still required footway and crossing work, kerb repairs, drainage surveys, surfacing and road markings. Excavation had begun for the bridge foundations. Sandgate Road was waiting for a UK Power Networks supply before granite, edgings and cobbles could be reinstated. Middelburg Square needed island surfacing and paving, while Bouverie Square had bench foundations and an infiltration tank but still awaited granite paving, tree pits and further landscaping.
That’s rather more than a bloke with a paintbrush touching up the skirting boards.
A few weeks later, the portfolio report announced 80%. Perhaps the works genuinely accelerated: construction programmes can move quickly once several fronts are open. The problem is that neither the 70% nor the 80% figure explains its denominator. Is progress measured by contract value, money certified, working days, physical area, work packages, quantities installed or a project manager’s overall assessment? Without the workings, “80% complete” is a polished headline with the sums rubbed out — about as transparent as frosted glass.
The lack of definition becomes more awkward when set beside FHDC’s capital dashboard. At 31 March 2026 it put physical completion at 45% and financial completion at 46%, with £9.413 million spent against a stated £20.4 million project budget. The later political report says 80%, but doesn’t explain how the measure changed or whether the two percentages are even counting the same thing. A 35-point leap isn’t impossible; it simply needs showing, not waving through like a friendly face at the door.
There’s another complication tucked under the carpet. The original A Brighter Future bid included Folca, and KCC’s 2023 report said the building element would remain with FHDC rather than being transferred under the delivery-partner agreement. It put Folca construction at about £2.28 million, plus a share of management, contingency, inflation, artistic and consultancy costs. Today FHDC’s dashboard lists “FOLCA 2” separately as a £12 million project, just 1% complete at March 2026. The later £12 million scheme isn’t a like-for-like substitute for the original allocation, but the evolution makes it essential for the council to say whether its 80% covers only Jackson’s highway contract, the remaining LUF programme, or something broader.
At present, it doesn’t.
By the time the council report on the scheme on 26 July 2026, Folkestone – A Brighter Future will already be one year, three months and 26 days beyond its original deadline. Even on the most generous reading, installing the Guildhall Street footbridge on 1 September would push the overrun to at least 519 days — 17 months and one day. If it doesn’t go in until 30 September, the delay reaches 548 days, exactly 18 months.
Nor would September necessarily mark the end of the wider programme. FHDC says the “substantive works” are due for completion by August 2026, yet its own June 2026 corporate update 2026/27 action plan continues “Delivering the ‘Folkestone: A brighter future’ project” throughout the financial year ending 31 March 2027, including delivering the agreed MHCLG outputs and outcomes. The same plan places completion of the bus-station building redevelopment within 2026/27. That doesn’t prove the main highways works will grind on until March 2027, but it does show the council itself hasn’t treated summer or autumn 2026 as the end of the whole affair. The finishing line hasn’t merely moved; FHDC’s own paperwork leaves part of the project somewhere on the far side of New Year.
Guildhall Street is the cleanest measure of the drift. Its package with Sandgate Road was due by September 2024. The bridge isn’t due to be installed until September 2026: two years after the whole package was supposed to be done and dusted, before any final inspection, snagging or handover is counted.
Bouverie Square tells much the same tale. It was due by December 2024, yet the portfolio report dated July 2026 says granite paving and only “some of the new benches” are being installed. That’s roughly 19 months behind the original milestone, with the wording itself making clear the last chapter hasn’t been written.
Station Approach was supposed to be complete in December 2023. Folkestone – A Brighter Future Newsletter Issue 13 was still describing crossings, drainage surveys, surfacing and road markings in that area in June 2026 — about two and a half years after the promised month. The timetable hasn’t lost a few minutes at a temporary traffic light; it has taken the scenic route through several financial years.
Follow the money — and mind the gaps
The original price was precise to the last tenner: £21,990,910. The Government’s Levelling Up Fund was to provide £19,791,819 and FHDC was to contribute £2,199,091, meeting the 10% match requirement. The scheme wasn’t marketed as a rough £22 million envelope to be sorted out later; it came with a cost plan, funding sources and named delivery responsibilities.
Nor was it a bare-bones estimate scratched on the back of a fag packet. The approved cost plan contained £12.151 million of net construction costs, £1.898 million of contractor preliminaries, £1.218 million for KCC management, £2.400 million of construction contingency, £1.817 million for professional fees and surveys, £600,001 for artistic elements, £1.058 million for inflation and £850,000 for non-standard replacement materials. Contingency and inflation alone came to almost £3.46 million. There was padding in the upholstery.
Optimism bias even had its own official line. The economic appraisal applied a 15% adjustment and calculated an economic cost of £23.219 million, set against forecast benefits of £47.241 million and a benefit-cost ratio of 2.03 to one, labelled “Good Value for Money”. Yet £39.384 million — more than four-fifths of the claimed benefit — came from assumed wider residential land-value uplift over the appraisal period. The spreadsheet acknowledged optimism bias; the delivery timetable appears to have kept its rose-tinted spectacles firmly on.
The original appraisal also attached benefits to new commercial workspace and labour-supply effects, with Folca forming part of the economic story. Because the building proposal, timing and wider Folca programme have since shifted, a forensic value-for-money review should ask whether the benefits still arise in the same form, on the same timetable and from the same scope. That doesn’t mean the old appraisal is automatically worthless; it means a four-year-old forecast shouldn’t be treated like holy writ after the project beneath it has been chopped, changed and delayed.
Who pays Jackson? Kent County Council does.
KCC is the contracting authority named on the procurement notice. It concluded the contract with Jackson Civil Engineering Limited on 15 January 2025 for £12,805,231.62 excluding VAT, after receiving two tenders. FHDC remains the accountable body for the grant and the overall programme, but the highways and public-realm money flows through the delivery arrangement and Kent administers the main works contract. In plain English, Kent signs Jackson’s cheques; FHDC still owns the political and financial responsibility for the scheme it bid for.
KCC’s supplier-payment data makes the trail visible. A line-by-line check of the official monthly files identifies eight payments to Jackson explicitly coded “Folkestone A Brighter Futures”: £339,843.99 in September 2025; £425,947.83 and £549,604.70 in October; £352,458.80 in November; £681,146.91 in December; £592,792.14 in January 2026; £661,154.98 in February; and £800,080.11 in March. Together they total £4,403,029.46 excluding VAT.
That’s a minimum, not Jackson’s final bill.
Earlier KCC files contain another £6.868 million of payments to Jackson between April and July 2025, but those entries sit under the broad service description “Structural Maintenance and Major Improvements”. Jackson was also being paid by Kent for other large highways jobs, including the Grovehurst and Key Street junction schemes, and the later ledgers show those projects separately. Without invoice-level evidence, purchase-order detail or a project cost code tying the early entries to Folkestone, sweeping all £6.868 million into A Brighter Future would be forensic accounting with a blindfold on. It has therefore been excluded from the confirmed Folkestone total.
That distinction matters. A figure can be eye-catching and still be wrong.
The wider spending profile is more revealing than any isolated invoice. In 2023/24 FHDC budgeted £1.731 million for A Brighter Future but spent £1.468 million, carrying £263,000 forward because of “slippage arising from delay in scheme”. By 31 March 2026 cumulative spending had reached £9.413 million, including £6.527 million during 2025/26. Those figures imply that only £1.418 million was spent in 2024/25 and that cumulative expenditure by 31 March 2025 — the original completion deadline — was just £2.886 million.
That’s 13.1% of the original £21.991 million budget.
Put another way, nearly 87p of every project pound remained unspent on the day the public was originally supposed to receive the finished scheme. That isn’t a minor profiling hiccup, an invoice arriving after month-end or a bit of loose change rolling into the next financial year. It’s the financial fingerprint of a programme that hadn’t remotely reached the stage promised.
The euphemism of choice is “reprofiling”. In 2025/26 the latest annual budget was £9 million, but actual expenditure was £6.527 million, leaving £2.473 million to be carried into 2026/27. The council report says main-contractor works were “reprofiled in line with actual expenditure”. In ordinary English, the work and the bills were kicked further down the road again.
FHDC’s headline budget has changed shape too. The original scheme was £21.991 million. The February 2024 capital programme carried £21.874 million, divided between £1.731 million in 2023/24, £16.475 million in 2024/25 and £3.668 million in 2025/26. The latest dashboard now gives a “total project budget” of £20.4 million. That’s £1.474 million below the 2024 programme and £1.591 million below the original bid.
It doesn’t follow that £1.591 million has vanished down the back of the sofa. The difference might reflect removed scope, released contingency, Folca expenditure being separated, a revised grant boundary or some other accounting change. But the public papers don’t provide a clean bridge from the original figure to the current one. The money hasn’t necessarily disappeared; the explanation has.
The Folca split may account for part of the fog, but not without a reconciliation. KCC’s original decision report expressly said only the funding for transport and public realm would be transferred to Kent, while Folca’s £2.28 million construction allocation and a proportion of management, contingency, inflation, art and consultancy fees would remain with FHDC. That’s precisely why the £12.805 million Jackson contract can’t be compared lazily with the entire £21.991 million programme. Different pots paid for different pieces of the jigsaw.
But different pots still have to add up.
The £1.287m question nobody should wave away
Kent’s 2025/26 outturn introduces a particularly awkward wrinkle. KCC reports a £1.287 million “real variance” on A Brighter Future and a further £6.794 million of rephasing. It says the £1.287 million was funded by moving £717,000 from the Consolidated Active Travel Fund, £470,000 from a flood budget and £100,000 from structures. A real variance changes the project’s cost or cash-limit position; rephasing changes the year in which expenditure falls. Neither is a saving, however much accountancy perfume is sprayed around it.
The published paper even leaves an internal drafting question beside the £470,000 transfer: “which budget line is this?” It’s probably an editing cock-up rather than the smoking gun in a cheap thriller, but when nearly half a million quid is being shifted into a flagship project, a report placed before Cabinet ought to know which cupboard the money came out of.
More importantly, KCC’s original report said no KCC capital or revenue funding would be required and that FHDC would be responsible for cost overruns. The 2026 outturn now shows a real variance being met from three other funding pots administered by Kent. Those facts aren’t necessarily incompatible: some of the money may be external grant funding lawfully redirected, the delivery agreement may allow agreed scope changes, or FHDC may remain liable under a later reconciliation. But the public papers don’t explain how the new transfers sit with the original promise. That loose floorboard needs lifting, not another rug thrown over it.
FHDC’s own match funding has also been rearranged. The original £2.199 million package included an expected £1 million Folca 1 lease premium or capital receipt. By November 2025, the council accepted that receipt was unlikely to materialise and replaced it with an extra £352,830 from the High Street Regeneration Reserve and £647,170 of Community Infrastructure Levy money. FHDC’s total match didn’t rise, but reserves and developer contributions had to step into the breach when the hoped-for property receipt failed to turn up.
That isn’t free money. CIL and reserves have alternative uses, so replacing a failed receipt carries an opportunity cost even where the project’s headline contribution remains unchanged. The public deserves to know not merely that the books balance, but what else those resources might otherwise have funded and whether the revised package remains the best use of them.
None of this proves the final authorised programme has overspent. The public record doesn’t yet supply Jackson’s final account, every NEC compensation event, a complete schedule of contract variations, the latest forecast at completion or a single consolidated statement reconciling FHDC and KCC expenditure. It would be reckless to declare a £22 million overspend when the evidence doesn’t establish one.
What the evidence does prove is serious enough.
The original delivery programme failed wholesale. The principal works started after the entire scheme was supposed to finish. The contractor was appointed roughly 18 months after the original July 2023 milestone. Only 13.1% of the original budget had been spent when the scheme should have been complete. Millions were repeatedly pushed into later years, the headline project budget fell without a plain-English reconciliation, KCC found £1.287 million from other pots, and the public still hasn’t been given one final date that means the same thing in every document.
The archived pages sharpen that conclusion rather than soften it. They show a project still consulting and investigating when early work packages should have been finishing; a promised autumn 2024 start that slipped to April 2025 and could now finally finish in 2027; final designs being shown after the original completion deadline; and a revised KCC timetable replacing the first timetable before the main contractor had broken ground. This wasn’t one unforeseen snag sending an otherwise sound programme a few weeks off course. It was a succession of resets, each one putting a fresh coat of paint over the date underneath.
The councils may eventually deliver worthwhile improvements. Safer crossings, better drainage, greener streets, a new public square, improved bus facilities and a bridge reconnecting Guildhall Street aren’t baubles; they can make a genuine difference to how Folkestone looks and works. Traders and residents can recognise that while still asking why the timetable was so detached from reality and why the financial story remains scattered across two councils, several appendices and a thicket of euphemisms.
“Slippage” sounds like a shoe skidding on a wet pavement. “Reprofiling” sounds like a harmless adjustment to a spreadsheet. “Substantive completion” sounds close enough to finished for the difference not to matter. Put them together, though, and they describe a scheme whose milestones were missed, whose money was repeatedly moved and whose finish line has become a travelling fair.
Call it what it is: the original plan collapsed.
By the date on the council’s “80% complete” report, A Brighter Future will be 482 days overdue. The September bridge installation pushes the minimum to 519 days. Guildhall Street will be two years behind its own milestone, Bouverie Square roughly 19 months late and Station Approach about two and a half years beyond the month originally promised. At least £4.403 million can be tied directly to Jackson through Kent’s published supplier data, yet the current project budget, the £1.287 million real variance and responsibility for any ultimate overrun still haven’t been reconciled for the public in one place.
Folkestone may yet get its brighter future. But optimism bias stopped being a technical percentage in an appraisal a long time ago. It has become the project’s governing metaphor: a timetable viewed through rose-tinted glass, a financial plan repeatedly redrawn and a finishing tape carried further down the road whenever the builders get near it.
The Shepway Vox Team
Dissent is NOT a Crime
