KCC Scraps £14.5m Junction 11 Waste Transfer Station for Folkestone & Hythe After £722,000 Spend

Kent County Council is preparing to abandon its planned waste transfer station (marked in orange below) beside Junction 11 of the M20, writing off around £722,000 already spent developing a scheme it approved less than a year ago. And the replacement isn’t cheaper: KCC’s own figures show the annual cost of managing Folkestone & Hythe’s waste could rise from £740,500 this year to as much as £1.729m in 2027/28.

So much for making every penny count.

KCC’s Reforming Kent strategy says precisely that — “make every penny count” — and promises a common-sense approach to public spending. Yet here we have nearly three-quarters of a million pounds written off, a multimillion-pound public infrastructure project halted, and taxpayers facing substantially higher annual revenue costs under the alternative now being recommended.

There’s also something rather important about the land itself.

Land Registry information obtained by The Shepway Vox Team, described as freehold land lying north of Ashford Road, Sandling, Hythe. The registered proprietors aren’t Kent County Council or Folkestone & Hythe District Council. They are Peter Laurence Murphy, Sarah Jane Murphy and Gerard Peter Tyler who purchased the land for £702,000 on 30 September 2003.

The accompanying Land Registry plan shows the red-edged parcel immediately north of Ashford Road and south of the railway.

The current Land Registry entry still records the three private proprietors.

But here’s the crucial distinction.

That isn’t the piece of land which has finally killed the project.

The fatal problem concerns additional land outside the main parcel secured by KCC. Planning permission requires that land for tree screening and ecological mitigation. Before KCC approved continuing with the scheme in October 2025, Folkestone & Hythe District Council had confirmed that it would purchase the extra land and put the necessary ownership arrangements in place. FHDC has now been unable to secure it within KCC’s required timescale. KCC says the planning conditions therefore can’t be discharged and the development can’t proceed in its current form.

What makes that considerably more awkward is that the problem wasn’t invisible.

Back in November 2024, FHDC’s own planning officers recorded that landscaping approximately 15 metres wide was proposed along the northern boundary but that the land sat outside the planning application’s red line and was therefore outside the applicant’s control. The Kent Downs National Landscape Unit also warned that the scheme relied partly on structural landscaping whose provision wasn’t under the applicant’s control.

In other words, more than a year before KCC now proposes pulling the plug, the public planning papers were already flagging the dependency on land beyond the development site.

Nevertheless, in October 2025 KCC pressed ahead. Its preferred Option 3 involved extending the collection of developer contributions to 2040, forward-funding some of those contributions and using £900,000 from the waste reserve. KCC described this option as financially, legally and politically low risk, saying it represented the lowest overall risk and presented very low service-delivery and legal/commissioning risks.

At that point, £492,032 had already been spent. KCC’s report expressly warned that this money would be written off if the project didn’t progress. Today the proposed write-off has grown to approximately £722,000 — roughly another £230,000 accumulated after the figure presented in the 2025 decision papers.

That’s where the accountability question bites.

The project itself had been kicking around since 2019. KCC originally investigated a site near Junction 13, but residential planning permission rendered part of that proposal unviable. Between 2019 and 2022 it examined and rejected 35 sites, eventually settling on Junction 11. By February 2024 it had secured its purchase option and progressed consultants, design work and planning.

KCC’s latest papers put the abandoned scheme at about £14.5m, with £8.3m expected ultimately from developer contributions, £5.3m from KCC capital and roughly £900,000 from the waste reserve. That is slightly lower than the £15.38m total cost presented in October 2025, when KCC said £6.165m would come from capital borrowing, £900,000 from waste reserves and £8.315m from developer contributions.

Now look at what replaces it.

KCC’s budget for managing all Folkestone & Hythe waste streams in 2026/27 is £740,500. Its forecast for 2027/28 under the commercial solution is approximately £1.553m if food waste can be included and £1.729m if it can’t. KCC says those higher costs are already reflected in its Medium Term Financial Plan, but that doesn’t alter the basic fact: the annual cost would more than double compared with the present budget. If food waste can’t be included, another £250,000 of infrastructure work could also be needed at an existing KCC site.

The alternative contract would handle approximately 40,000 tonnes of waste a year. KCC’s May 2026 preliminary market engagement envisaged a service beginning by January 2028, covering receipt, bulking and onward haulage, with an estimated contract value of about £10.5m excluding VAT over the indicative 2028–2034 period.

There is a legitimate defence for changing course. In October 2025 KCC had rejected a commercial solution as unviable. Market testing carried out in May 2026 subsequently found commercial interest and capacity, so sticking doggedly to an undeliverable council-owned facility simply because money had already been spent would risk throwing good money after bad.

But that doesn’t absolve what came before.

KCC’s current recommendation explicitly says the principal development cannot proceed because FHDC couldn’t secure the additional land. Yet KCC knew before approving Option 3 that delivery depended on land outside its existing site; planning officers had identified that vulnerability in 2024; and KCC nevertheless described the preferred option as low risk while expenditure continued climbing.

The proposed decision, 26/00054, was first published on 4 August and is due to be considered by KCC’s Growth, Environment and Transport Cabinet Committee on 9 September 2026. It would formally cease work on Junction 11 and authorise procurement of the commercial transfer service instead.

Before anybody signs that off, KCC and FHDC should publish exactly who owns the additional mitigation land, when FHDC obtained its option over it, what the option cost, what price was required to exercise it, why the acquisition failed, when KCC first realised it was unlikely to happen, and exactly how much of the £722,000 was spent after the October 2025 decision. They should also explain whether KCC will incur any cost in allowing its four-year option over the main site to lapse.

Because “making every penny count” ought to mean more than finding a new procurement route after the old one has gone belly-up.

It ought to mean explaining how a £14.5m project dependent upon land the councils didn’t control was allowed to reach the point where £722,000 of public money had been spent before somebody finally called time.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime