Kent Local Government Reorganisation: The Unanswered Questions Facing Mid Kent Council

The presentation began on reassuring ground. Kent and Medway programme director Tim Woolmer (pictured) said the councils’ collaboration had been “second to none”, despite different political colours and competing preferences over the map. He is hosted by Kent County Council but said his team works neutrally for all 14 authorities. Eleven countywide groups have already been picking through assets, contracts, pensions, staffing, finance, data and technology, while Folkestone & Hythe has built its own programme board and workstreams.

Then the questions started.

What emerged over the next three-quarters of an hour wasn’t a council caught napping. Officers have plainly done a stack of preparatory work. But the meeting exposed the gulf between being organised for a merger and knowing what the merged council will actually look like. With 611 days to vesting day, councillors heard that the legal order may arrive perilously late, the transition grant won’t cover the bill and candidates don’t yet know the job they’ll be standing for.

Martin had already identified the hardest part. Districts know waste collection, housing and planning, he said, but breaking up KCC’s countywide services will be a “steep learning curve”. Adult social care and children’s services can’t be sliced into four neat portions like a traybake. Cases, contracts, staff, court duties, safeguarding systems and confidential records must move without vulnerable people falling between the floorboards.

Folkestone & Hythe has tried to get its own house in order. Andrina Smith (pictured), the council’s LGR programme director and chief HR officer, said about 44 service teams had completed standard summaries covering budgets, staffing, vacancies, partnerships and operational dependencies. Rather than letting managers feed information into the countywide system independently, the council checked it centrally to avoid double counting and make it “as accurate as we could be”. It has also reviewed contracts, software, structures, job descriptions and subject experts who may be needed at short notice.

The trouble is that the legal starting pistol may be fired with the runners already halfway round the track.

The Structural Changes Order, or SCO, is the legislation that will abolish the old councils, create the new ones and establish transitional arrangements. Woolmer said it is now expected to be laid towards the end of 2026 and enacted in late winter or early spring 2027. Martin said the worst timetable he had seen put commencement in March — just before the pre-election period and barely two months before shadow elections in May. “It’s really, really tight,” he said.

The councils therefore expect to create voluntary joint committees before they possess the formal statutory machinery. Once the SCO takes effect, formal joint committees may have time to meet only twice before the elections. In those few meetings they could be expected to settle terms of reference, elect chairs, consider funding, prepare a shadow constitution, examine allowances and codes of conduct and make recommendations on interim statutory officers. That isn’t leisurely institution-building; it is flat-pack government with half the instructions arriving late.

Cllr Anita Jones (Green pictured) brought the timetable down from constitutional theory to ordinary life. People considering standing in 2027 need to know the workload, hours and allowance, she said, particularly if they have jobs. Woolmer’s answer was candid: “Right now, no.” The work would be done before parties began serious candidate selection, he said, while chief executive Dr Susan Priest added that an independent remuneration panel would examine allowances.

Even the basic shape remains provisional. The 4B business case proposes a 60-member Mid Kent Council, with three councillors in each of 20 divisions. Priest said the current arithmetic suggested 18 members from the Folkestone & Hythe area, forming part of the 60, but added that the detail was still being “crunched through”. Councils had until 17 August to state their preference on the first warding arrangements.

Cllr Alan Martin (Con – pictured) pushed the point further. Would the new authority follow KCC’s pattern of daytime meetings or the district’s more accessible evening model? During the “magic” overlap, he warned, successful candidates could serve the shadow council while legacy authorities continued operating. Woolmer corrected the magic year to 11 months but accepted the difficulty. The old and new bodies will coexist, some members may sit on both, and much will depend on their willingness to cooperate.

There is a democratic sting in the tail. Existing councils can design services and make recommendations, but they can’t tie the incoming shadow authority’s hands. The councillors elected next May may approve the preparatory work, alter it or send parts back to the drawing board. Woolmer acknowledged there would be “bumps in the road”; Whitehall could intervene if the programme went badly wrong, but he hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

Cllr Rich Holgate then produced what chair Cllr Tony Hills called a “nice shopping list”: staff retention, possible completion bonuses, risk reviews, public explanations of shadow elections, reserves, council buildings and support for towns and parishes.

Smith said Folkestone & Hythe’s staff retention was better than it had been for several years and that a recent pulse survey showed rising optimism. The council has a tool for identifying critical posts, single points of failure and looming retirements. Retention payments remain possible, but Kent’s chief executives are split over what Smith called “golden handcuffs”. Some favour them; others don’t. There will be no countywide one-size-fits-all policy.

That reassurance sits beside a risk register which deserves a harder look. It lists nine threats, including inadequate capacity, staff losses, harm to ordinary services, duplicated work, missed deadlines, insufficient funding, poor engagement, a snap election and inaccurate information. Every risk was given the same score and marked “tolerable”. Smith said it was an early snapshot and would be kept under review, but treating nine very different hazards as peas in the same pod risks hiding which one could derail the programme.

Staffing is still lean. Smith is spending about 80% of her time on reorganisation, while programme manager Zoe Law is due to move full-time into the role in September. Two extra HR staff have been recruited because the workload is expected to arrive quickly. Nothing has yet been deprioritised, Smith said, although she described the coming demand as “almost a bit of an unknown beast”.

Then came the money.

Cllr Paul Thomas (Ind – pictured)  had read Steve Reed’s letter and believed the announced £63 million capacity fund was for Kent. “I thought the £63 million pounds was for us,” he said after Woolmer explained otherwise.

It is a national pot.

Kent and Medway expect £900,000 for each of the four new unitary areas, plus up to £150,000 apiece for leadership capacity in children’s services, adult social care and public health. That is a maximum of about £4.2 million, which the councils intend to pool into the countywide programme. Woolmer warned that it was unlikely to fund the work through to vesting day.

The scale of the gap matters. The ShepwayVox Team’s earlier forensic examination of Option 4B found an estimated one-off implementation cost of £130.9 million, against annual net recurring savings of between £18.9 million and £34.6 million after disaggregation costs. On those assumptions, the payback period could be between 7.8 and 14.3 years. Whitehall has ordered the move, but Kent will pay most of the removal bill.

Nobody could yet say where Mid Kent’s council chamber or headquarters will be. Woolmer said it was simply too early. Nor is there detailed government guidance yet on inherited reserves, although the broad principle is that each successor inherits the financial position of the councils folded into it. Folkestone & Hythe, Ashford and Swale won’t arrive carrying identical balance sheets, contracts, property portfolios or spending pressures. One crest won’t make the baggage weigh the same.

Priest supplied the meeting’s most unexpected detail when Cllr Bridget Chapman asked about assets. The initial countywide audit had found property outside council boundaries, KCC assets outside Kent and “two assets overseas”.

Their locations, purposes and values weren’t identified. Some assets may pass to the council where they sit; others support services across the county and will require agreements over ownership, access, income and liabilities. Existing legal disputes have been assessed, but the list will keep changing.

Devolution adds another layer. Kent and Medway still want a strategic authority, potentially taking powers over transport and spatial planning, but ministers haven’t settled what or when. Woolmer said the councils’ concern was that countywide functions might be disaggregated among four councils, only to be aggregated again later. Taking the machinery apart twice would be a fine way to spend money without improving a service.

The final stretch of the debate returned repeatedly to town and parish councils. Alan Martin warned of a “vacuum of authority” when a parish or town council performs poorly, saying responsibility slips between the monitoring officer and the Kent Association of Local Councils. Holgate argued that parish capacity deserved its own workstream and proper support rather than being left to chance.

Priest didn’t dismiss the concern. She said councils had initially welcomed the White Paper’s promise to “rewire the relationship”, but the idea had “died to death”. Folkestone & Hythe is heavily parished, yet capacity, skills, money and appetite vary sharply. The difficulty, she said, was blunt: the district understood the gap but didn’t have the authority to intervene.

Thomas added that only the same six or eight parishes regularly engaged with joint meetings.

The risk was recognised; the power to fix it was somewhere else.

By the end, Martin offered three priorities in order: business as usual, safe and legal delivery, then reorganisation. “No one’s bin gets missed because of local government reorganisation,” he said. If an LGR milestone slipped to protect the first two, so be it.

But Martin had already called the entire exercise “an enormous distraction” and said he hoped it would be worth the mountain of meetings and work. That is the story sitting beneath the programme charts. Folkestone & Hythe isn’t doing nothing; far from it. It is working flat out to abolish itself, while the law is late, the funding is thin and some of the biggest decisions belong to councillors who haven’t yet been elected.

The confident slides said Kent was prepared.

The questions showed what “prepared” currently means.