Folkestone Town Mayor Jackie Meade on Community, Charity and Civic Pride

Folkestone’s Town Mayor for 2026/27 talks to The Shepway Vox Team about unfinished business after Covid, residents priced out of the town’s success, unheard unpaid carers, dangerous crossings, community volunteers and why the mayoralty must amount to more than robes, photographs and ribbon-cutting.

Jackie Meade’s second term as Folkestone’s Town Mayor (pictured) is both a return and a farewell. Her first mayoral year, in 2019/20, was cut short by the Covid lockdown. She has now been elected mayor for 2026/27, but says she will not stand for the town council again.

“I’m not standing for election again,” she said. “So this is my last year on town, and I really wanted to go out and say thank you to Folkestone. You know, it’s been an honour, and I’m going to try and do something really special for the charities.”

What were councillors endorsing when they returned you to the role?

Meade believes councillors were endorsing continuity and experience. She served as deputy mayor to Lucy McGirr during 2025/26 and said she offered support because she understood how demanding the role could be for a first-time mayor.

“It is incredibly busy,” she said. “So if you work full time, if you’ve got a young family, it’s very, very difficult.”

Meade also works full time, but flexitime allows her to organise work around civic engagements. This time, she does not face the steep learning curve of her first year.

“I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I know what I’m doing,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been helping some of the brand-new mayors settle in to what they’re doing.”

She said she lost almost three months of her previous mayoralty to lockdown and wanted another opportunity to serve a full year and beat the £13,500 she previously raised for charity.

Her new target is £15,000. Her charities are The Shed Urban Wilderness – Folkestone Youth Project, Sunflower House – Folkestone Food Support and Folkestone Nepalese Community Centre.

Meade said donations are paid into a dedicated charity account through the town hall. Residents can contact Georgina Wilson, the officer responsible for her diary and invitations, for details.

“All the money goes through the town hall straight into the charity account,” she said. “Can’t be touched from anywhere else.”

How do you make a ceremonial office meaningful in a town dealing with serious problems?

The mayoralty is formally apolitical. Folkestone’s poverty, housing pressures, town-centre decline, public-safety concerns and arguments over regeneration are not.

Meade’s answer was to distinguish party politics from human need.

“My approach is: I’m a human being,” she said. “I live in one of the most deprived areas in Folkestone. I’ve been working and volunteering with projects here, trying to help raise some of the issues that people have.”

She referred to community fridges, cadets, the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal and taking part in counts of people sleeping rough.

“I really care,” she said. “I’m a human; they’re a human, and it’s my job as a human, especially if I’ve got a stronger voice, being the mayor, to actually do everything I can to try and alleviate some of the problems.

“Not making it political, I’m making it a human issue.”

What did your previous mayoral year teach you about the lived reality of Folkestone?

“All of a sudden, I felt like I had to look after the town,” Meade said. “I was almost like the mum.”

She found herself walking through Folkestone thinking: “We need to do this, and we need to do that.”

What struck her most was not the official version of Folkestone, but the residents working quietly beneath it.

“What really struck me is the amount of unsung heroes we have in this town,” she said. “They’re the people that go that extra mile to help people around them and never, ever look for it to be in the newspapers, on Facebook. They just get on with it.”

Meade named Pam Jones, referring to her work with homeless food kitchens, the community fridge and fostering. She also spoke about volunteers supporting cadets, scouts and The Shed.

“A lot of the volunteers, who actually most people wouldn’t know from Adam, volunteer in more than one area,” she said.

“It’s almost like when they start volunteering, they almost get the bug. ‘What else can I do? What else can I do? What else can I do?’”

Folkestone is marketed as creative and regenerated. How do you speak for residents who feel priced out or left behind?

“With regeneration or gentrification, whatever you want to call it, there are always winners and there are always losers,” Meade said.

Her biggest concern is that young families are being priced out.

“That actually sets up huge amounts of problems in the future,” she said.

Meade accepts that the Harbour Arm brings visitors and money, but questioned how widely those benefits are shared. Tourists gather on the seafront, she said, while the traditional town centre struggles.

“Well done for creating a place for people to go, but I want to see the love shared a little bit more.”

She said she has challenged people who describe regeneration as the best thing ever to happen to Folkestone.

“I am quite quick in explaining that not everyone is actually finding opportunities with the regeneration,” she said.

Nor can every household afford the version of Folkestone built around expensive leisure spending.

“Not just the people that can afford to go out every Sunday and pay seven pounds-plus a pint, because not everyone can.”

When the interviewer added, “Or £10 for a burger,” Meade replied: “The majority of families in Folkestone can’t.”

Her practical response is to lend community organisations her visibility.

“I always put Folkestone first,” she said. “If two different events come in, I’ll always go to the Folkestone one.”

Her message to local projects is: “Use me as publicity. Use me as publicity to try and get some extra funding.”

A mayoral photograph, she believes, can give a small project “a certain amount of kudos”. But she was clear about the limit of the office: as mayor, she cannot become involved in the political decisions governing planning and regeneration.

What do you say to residents who believe consultation happens after the real choices have been shaped?

Meade said consultation over the town-centre regeneration ran through several stages, but too few people took part.

“I think it was a mixture of two things,” she said. “Your average person on the street didn’t know that the consultation [was happening]. So the communication about people’s ability to input into things wasn’t as strong as it should have been.

“And two: the problem is people think that decisions have been made before they even talk to the public.”

She also recognised a structural weakness: “Quite often it’s those that shout the loudest get their voice heard.”

Her clearest example was Central Roundabout. Meade attended two consultations as a resident and raised concerns about the proposed positions of zebra crossings.

“I felt that they were dangerous,” she said. “We were assured by highways: ‘No, it’s under the legislation.’ But practical sense tells you that it’s not in a good place.”

For Meade, that exposed the gap between technical compliance and lived experience.

“Where residents are saying, ‘No, that isn’t practical’, or ‘That won’t work’, because they’ve got practical experience of it, [that] doesn’t always manage to get through the legal side of it, and it can be incredibly frustrating.”

She recalled raising similar concerns near Radnor Park soon after joining the town council, having seen near misses involving toddlers and prams. Meade said she was told it was a KCC matter and that nothing would happen until somebody died.

“All the time that I was on KCC as a councillor, I got told the same,” she said.

Meade has served as a town, district and county councillor. Yet it is the town council she calls “the coalface”.

“That’s where you really get to talk to people,” she said. “That’s where you really get to see what’s going on.”

Which communities or voices are still not being heard loudly enough?

Meade answered immediately: unpaid carers.

“This is something that we’ve been fighting against, shouting against, for probably about eight years,” she said. “I was an unpaid carer.”

She welcomed better wages for paid care workers but said unpaid carers were largely absent from the debate.

“These are the carers that are doing probably 50, 70 hours a week, quite often looking after a loved one, sometimes including children.”

“You’re told you do it through love,” she said. “They are trying to juggle everything, quite often without any support whatsoever.”

Again, she connected the problem to housing.

“Where we’re pricing out our younger families, and the parents are staying here, as the parents get older, they have no support around them. So the whole thing actually intermeshes.”

Meade praised local support groups that provide respite and somewhere for carers to meet people who understand their lives.

“It’s only an unpaid carer that will actually understand the problems that another unpaid carer has,” she said.

She was unimpressed by policies allowing carers to earn more from employment before losing Carer’s Allowance.

“What part of these people are working 60 to 70 hours a week, plus trying to do a part-time job?” she asked.

“I should be jumping up and down because you’ve just told me that I can do some more hours in my part-time job on top of my 60 and 70 hours, when I’m actually saving this country billions of pounds annually?

“We need to be hearing these unpaid carers because they’re really suffering.”

What makes regeneration a success?

“We’re all shouting, ‘We need more homes. We need more homes.’ But we actually need homes that people can actually afford to live in,” Meade said.

“It’s great that you’ve got houses being put up everywhere — £650,000. They’re great for the people that can afford £650,000.”

For those who cannot buy, she said, Folkestone needs decent rented accommodation. Luxury homes may bring people with money to spend and support shops and employment, but they cannot be the whole strategy.

Successful regeneration must also mean functioning buses, decent roads, good education, jobs and accessible healthcare.

“Not everyone owns a car,” she said. “And at the moment, if you do drive around in a car, you’re just as likely to burst your tyres on a pothole.”

Meade recalled visiting a primary school with only around 50 library books. She said she subsequently secured £1,000 for each primary school in her former KCC division, with 10 per cent reserved for SEND reading or educational material.

“The kids were so excited about reading again,” she said.

“We need to be encouraging those children to read and to become involved in education, because without the youngsters coming through and being educated, the rest of it will just fall apart.”

Then came healthcare.

“GPs. Oh my Lord,” she said. “Without health, you’ll get nothing done.”

Meade said it took three weeks to obtain what she considered an emergency appointment with a nurse.

“So much for preventative medicine.”

Her conclusion was that regeneration must be considered “holistically”, although Folkestone Town Council does not have the money or powers to solve the largest problems.

What should Folkestone be proud of — and brave enough to confront?

“We should be proud of our communities that all support each other,” Meade said.

During lockdown, neighbours spoke and checked on one another. Afterwards, she felt people withdrew again. From the mayor’s chair, however, she sees voluntary organisations and local projects as “the driving force behind the community here”.

Folkestone should also make more of its history, remembrance traditions and music. Meade praised Music in May, while warning that cultural projects continue to struggle for funding.

“There’s only so much that the town council can do because we are definitely not awash with money.”

What should the town confront?

“I would challenge the uprising of intolerance,” she said.

Meade described people being insulted because of their culture, religion or simply for disagreeing. She said she had been spat at while campaigning and had blocked 150 people on Facebook because of abuse.

“What happened to people being able to debate something and still walk away as human beings who aren’t going to attack each other?” she asked.

“You debated things out. You didn’t just insult people. It doesn’t resolve anything.”

What practical legacy do you want from your mayoral year?

Meade wants the £15,000 appeal to make a direct difference to young people, veterans, older residents and families struggling to buy food.

“If by raising some funds for those, I can make the difference to those kids, so that they stay in school, they do well, and they go on to have a really good life,” she said.

She wants to help Folkestone Nepalese Community Centre after an increase in its rent, allowing it to continue supporting veterans and bringing older people together.

“And if I can help those families that are really struggling because they can’t put food on the table because the pound just isn’t stretching far enough, I’d be happy with that.”

“I don’t care if anyone points a finger at me for that,” she said. “I really, really don’t care. In my heart, I’ll know that I’ve done everything that I possibly can.”

At the end of the year, what should residents ask to judge whether you used the office well?

Meade identified three responsibilities: carrying out civic duties, promoting Folkestone and tourism, and raising money for charity.

She also has an idea that could bring those ambitions together: a music video showing Folkestone and its communities at their best.

“We need a Folkestone anthem,” she said.

The proposal is still being developed. Meade said she needed permission to use a particular song and was trying to bring together people who could film it.

“It’s about thinking out of the box and showing what a great town and what great communities we’ve got.”

Her fundraising target remains £15,000. If divided equally, that would mean £5,000 for each charity.

“I’ve spoken to the three charities,” she said. “£5,000 would make such a big difference to them for what they’re trying to do.”

“I can promise you every single penny will make a difference.”

Then, Meade said, she will return to private life.

Folkestone, she agreed, is a great place to live, work and enjoy.

“It is, and we need to enjoy it,” she said. “We just need to challenge the bits that aren’t really working for people.”

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