Kent County Council Exit Payments: £1.66m Gap Between Official Figures

Kent County Council says its efficiency drive is about making “every penny count”. Yet its 2025/26 accounts record £1.112m of exit packages while the Government’s official return records £2.773m. Across Kent, other councils’ figures can reconcile. At County Hall, they don’t.

There are 166,088,500 pennies between KCC’s two figures.

That’s quite a lot for an administration which says it’s watching every one of them.

KCC’s draft Statement of Accounts 25/26 records 161 exit packages costing £1,112,115 during 2025/26: 72 compulsory redundancies and 89 other agreed departures. The Government’s newly published local-authority exit-payment data records £2.773m for Kent. Its published total and £15,000 average point to an underlying 185 packages once MHCLG’s disclosure rounding is taken into account.

The difference is £1,660,885.

And this is where DOLGE enters the room.

When Reform UK took control of KCC in May 2025, Leader Linden Kemkaran created its local government efficiency operation. KCC subsequently described its job as to “systematically look at every penny KCC spends”. Kemkaran has since told councillors her administration had developed a “deliberate focus on how every penny of taxpayers’ money is managed and spent”.

In July 2026, that approach was formalised in KCC’s DOLGE Strategy. One of its four priorities is “ensuring spend and savings are to budget”, while the wider Reforming Kent strategy promises to “make every penny count”. That sits rather awkwardly with what happened just five months earlier: in February 2026, Cllr Matthew Fraser Moat, who was leading KCC’s DOLGE drive to root out waste, resigned after telling the Financial Times the council had “not made any cuts”, while deputy cabinet member Paul Chamberlain conceded Reform had expected to find American-style “craziness” in Kent but “we didn’t find any of that.”

So here’s the awkward question.

If DOLGE’s job was and is to follow KCC’s money, how has a £1.66m disagreement between two official records made it this far without a public explanation?

There are technicalities. The Government spreadsheet warns that total exit-payment values are rounded to the nearest £1,000, averages to the nearest £100 and package numbers to the nearest ten. It also suppresses some data where very few people are involved. That means a displayed “190” shouldn’t be casually reported as precisely 190 employees. Small apparent differences can therefore be perfectly innocent.

But £1.66m isn’t a rounding error.

Elsewhere, the exercise shows that the numbers can behave themselves.

Folkestone & Hythe’s accounts record five 2025/26 packages costing £44,000 — exactly the value in the Government return once its rounded headcount is understood properly. Sevenoaks records nine packages costing £129,000, again matching the Government total. Those clean comparisons matter because they provide a control: two different reporting systems don’t inevitably produce wildly different answers.

Then there’s Ashford.

Its draft accounts record 18 employee terminations costing £104,050, while the Government return gives £153,000 and an average package of £25,600. Allowing for MHCLG’s rounding rules, that Government figure is consistent with six packages — not eighteen. The cash gap is £48,950, but the headcount difference is arguably more striking. There may be a legitimate reporting explanation; the published documents don’t presently make it obvious.

Some councils can’t yet be put through the same test. Medway’s Government return gives £176,000, but Medway says its 2025/26 draft accounts missed the statutory publication deadline because preparation and internal review weren’t complete. Gravesham has published an almost identical notice of delay. Those aren’t proven discrepancies — they’re unfinished comparisons waiting for the accounts to arrive.

Dover adds another wrinkle. Its accounts record seven exits costing £141,000, matching the Government headline total. Yet the Government spreadsheet itself carries a note saying Dover subsequently identified £61,784.16 in pension-strain costs relating to three exit packages after submitting its return. That doesn’t mean £61,784 should simply be slapped on top of £141,000 — accounting periods and package recognition matter — but it certainly deserves an explanation as to how the correction affects the published return.

For The ShepwayVox Team, there’s a familiar smell to all this.

In December 2024 we exposed Folkestone & Hythe’s draft accounts showing £317,000 of 2023/24 exit packages when the Government data showed £640,000. The higher figure subsequently appeared after the discrepancy was raised. In January 2025 we widened the investigation across Kent, and in July 2025 reported that KCC’s Government exit-payment figures for 2021/22 to 2024/25 totalled about £10.7m, against roughly £3.65m in its published accounts. Now, for 2025/26, another large KCC difference has appeared — again with the Government figure substantially higher.

That history makes the latest discrepancy much harder to brush off as a one-off oddity.

The evidence is straightforward. A Kent taxpayer can open KCC’s official 2025/26 accounts and find £1,112,115 in exit packages, then turn to the Government’s official dataset for the same financial year and find £2,773,000.

That shouldn’t take detective work to reconcile.

KCC should publish the bridge between those two figures, line by line if necessary. Ashford should likewise explain why its accounts record 18 employee terminations while the Government data points to six packages. If perfectly legitimate differences in accounting treatment explain both discrepancies, splendid. Put the workings on the table and the questions disappear.

Because DOLGE wasn’t sold to Kent residents as a unit for chasing office plants, subscriptions and other small change while million-pound discrepancies sat in plain sight. It was supposed to scrutinise spending, challenge assumptions and make “every penny count”.

Fine.

There are 166,088,500 pennies between KCC’s two official exit-payment figures.

Before County Hall goes hunting for the next saving, perhaps DOLGE could start by counting those.

Then show Kent the bloody workings.