‘We Don’t Record It’: Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Procurement Waiver Claim Unravels

Folkestone & Hythe District Council told councillors that requests to bypass its normal procurement rules had fallen. Minutes later, officers admitted rejected requests weren’t recorded, financial values had been left out, and some departments ran out of time after inviting only the bare minimum number of suppliers.

“How many waivers were not approved?”

Councillor Paul Thomas’s question at Wednesday night’s Audit and Governance Committee was about as simple as they come. The council’s report said 26 waivers had been approved in 2025/26. Thomas wanted to know how many other requests had been refused.

The answer was less precise.

“I’m not certain off the top of my head because we don’t record it,” the s151 officer Alan Mitchell (pictured) replied. “There were maybe three or four.” She explained that officers were sometimes sent away to use another route instead. Section 151 Officer Alan Mitchell then confirmed that recording refusals wasn’t required.

That exchange matters because FHDC says waiver requests fell from 36 in 2024/25 to 26 in 2025/26.

It hasn’t proved that.

A waiver is simply formal permission to bypass the council’s usual competitive buying process for a contract worth more than £25,000. It should normally be agreed in advance, used only in exceptional circumstances and supported by written reasons and approval from the Section 151 and Monitoring Officers. Genuine urgency, a sole supplier, specialist work, compatible parts or software may justify one. An authorised framework can also permit a direct award, while a genuine emergency may be approved afterwards. What officers can’t do is split a contract to make it look cheaper.

The figure of 36 is the number of requests the council now says were made in 2024/25. The figure of 26 is the number approved in 2025/26. One counts everyone who asked. The other counts only those allowed through.

It is the difference between applications and successful applications.

FHDC’s own papers make the gap clearer. In May 2025, its Waiver Strategy said 33 waivers had been recorded during 2024/25. The latest report now says there were 36 requests in that same year. A possible explanation is that 36 applications were submitted and 33 became recorded waivers, leaving three refused, withdrawn or redirected.

Possible, however, isn’t the same as recorded. FHDC hasn’t identified those three cases or said what happened to them.

For 2025/26, the hole is larger. The council knows 26 waivers were approved, but because refusals and redirections weren’t logged, it doesn’t know — or at least hasn’t published — the total number requested. The officer’s “maybe three or four” was an estimate from memory, not an audit trail.

Imagine a company saying job applications fell from 36 last year to 26 this year. Then imagine discovering that 26 was merely the number hired, while nobody counted this year’s applications. Fewer people may have applied. More may have applied. The figures simply can’t tell you.

That is the central flaw in FHDC’s claim of improvement.

Go back one year and the council’s concern about waivers was plain. The May 2025 strategy, produced after Mitchell reviewed the process, identified high volumes, thin or inconsistent explanations, limited challenge, reliance on familiar suppliers and retrospective requests arriving after a supplier had been chosen or work had started.

The 33 recorded waivers were worth £1,741,254.15. Twelve sat below £25,000 and together were worth £195,173.50. The largest was a £475,000 waiver for temporary accommodation, around 27% of the total. That paper didn’t merely count cases; it showed councillors where the money went.

The new report doesn’t.

Thomas asked for the combined value of the 26 approved waivers and the value of the largest. Councillor Rich Holgate called the absence of values a “missing component” and questioned how the committee could scrutinise whether the waivers were legally permissible without them.

Mitchell promised to obtain the figures, but said one reason for leaving values out was that a single large contract could “skew” the report.

That is a peculiar argument. A large waiver isn’t an inconvenient speck to be rubbed off the lens. It is precisely the sort of thing an audit committee needs to see. If one contract dominates the total, that doesn’t distort the picture; it is the picture.

The omission also breaks a promise made in the 2025 strategy. FHDC said waivers would be reviewed quarterly by service, value and reason, with repeat users or departments identified for targeted improvement. The latest paper gives broad categories, but no total value, supplier list, repeat-user analysis or service-by-service breakdown.

Then the meeting produced another revealing moment.

Seven of the 26 approved waivers were blamed on too few responses to requests for quotations and too little time to run the exercise again. Thomas asked what had caused that.

The Procurement Officer said that in most of those cases departments had begun without much lead-in time. In some instances, officers needed three quotations and invited only three suppliers. When one failed to reply, they were short of the required number and didn’t have time to try again.

Put bluntly: they needed three quotes, so they asked only three firms.

That wasn’t true of every case, and it doesn’t establish misconduct. It does show that some urgency was home-made. No margin had been allowed for a supplier declining, missing the email or simply not bothering.

The published breakdown points the same way. Four waivers were for short-term continuity, six kept a previous or current contractor, and seven arose after insufficient quotation responses with too little time to retender. That is 17 of the 26 connected to continuity, an incumbent supplier or a clock that had run down. None was classified as urgency caused by an external deadline.

If the deadline didn’t come from outside, councillors are entitled to ask who inside the council let the clock run down.

Every one of the 26 waivers was nevertheless approved under the broad exemption allowing a Chief Officer to proceed in whatever manner was considered most expedient for efficient management of the service. Yet the previous strategy had promised to narrow that discretion and expressly rule out convenience, familiarity and late planning as acceptable reasons.

FHDC also points to its new Financial Management System, designed to link contracts, purchase orders, approvals and payments, and stop officers raising orders without evidence that procurement rules were followed. That may improve the position from 2026/27 onwards.

It cannot explain the claimed fall during 2025/26. The system launched in April 2026, after that financial year had ended. The cavalry arrived after the battle.

Nor were the old records spotless. The report says officers spent the latter half of 2025/26 finding information missing from the contract register, which is now said to be up to date. That is welcome, but it confirms the register previously had gaps.

After hearing that rejected requests weren’t counted, values were missing, some procurements started too late and several officers invited only the minimum number of suppliers, the committee moved to the recommendations.

Members agreed to note the council’s “continued robust governance” of procurement.

That phrase now does a great deal of heavy lifting.

FHDC may genuinely have reduced its reliance on waivers. Nothing heard at the meeting proves otherwise. But neither the report nor the answers given to councillors establish that waiver requests fell from 36 to 26.

To do that, the council needs four simple figures for each year: requests made, waivers approved, requests rejected or redirected, and the total value approved. It should also publish the largest waiver, the suppliers involved and the promised breakdown by service and repeat use.

Until then, the position is stark. Thirty-six requests apparently became 33 recorded waivers in 2024/25, with three cases unexplained. In 2025/26, 26 were approved, but the total number requested wasn’t counted.

FHDC hasn’t shown that waiver requests fell.

It has shown that its record-keeping wasn’t good enough to know.

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