Folkestone & Hythe Complaints Surge 88% as 60 Residents Demand a Second Answer

Folkestone & Hythe District Council makes residents a pretty clear promise on its website: “We aim to resolve any complaint at stage one.” Yet in 2025/26, 60 complaints reached Stage 2, compared with 32 the year before. That’s an increase of 88%. Stage 1 complaints rose too, from 136 to 195.

That Stage 2 figure is the one worth dwelling on.

FHDC operates a two-stage system. At Stage 1, a complaints investigator or specialist from the relevant service looks into what’s gone wrong. The council says it should acknowledge the complaint within five working days and respond within 10 working days after acknowledgement. Stage 2 comes if the complainant believes that first response “has not fully and satisfactorily addressed” their complaint. The second investigation is carried out by the lead officer of the service area concerned.

So put the jargon to one side. The number of complaints getting beyond the point where FHDC says it aims to have resolved them has almost doubled in a year.

And this isn’t simply a case of complaint numbers returning to where they were. In 2023/24 FHDC recorded 239 Stage 1 complaints and 38 at Stage 2. The following year those fell to 136 and 32. Now Stage 1 has rebounded to 195, while Stage 2 has climbed to 60 — substantially higher than either of the previous two years. FHDC’s headline Ombudsman figure has moved from 14, to seven, to 25 over the same period, although the later reports define those figures more specifically as Ombudsman enquiries or investigations, so 25 most certainly doesn’t mean 25 findings against the council.

Nor does an escalation automatically mean the resident was right. That distinction matters. At Stage 1, FHDC actually improved its uphold rate in 2025/26: 53 of 195 complaints were upheld or partially upheld, 27%, down from 40% the previous year. But at Stage 2 the picture went the other way. In 2024/25 five of 32 escalated complaints were upheld or partly upheld, 16%. In 2025/26 it was 15 out of 60, or 25%. More complaints went upstairs, and a greater proportion of those escalated complaints ended with FHDC accepting that something, at least in part, had gone wrong.

Housing stands out.

The Housing Landlord Service had 46 Stage 1 complaints in 2024/25, of which an eye-catching 27 — 58.6% — were upheld or partially upheld. By 2025/26 Stage 1 had improved: 36 complaints, 14 upheld or partly upheld, a rate of 39%. But further up the process things worsened. Stage 2 landlord complaints rose from seven to 16, with eight upheld or partially upheld. That’s half.

Housing Strategy and Options was worse at Stage 2. Nine complaints reached that point in 2025/26 and five were upheld or partly upheld — 56%. Between the two main housing functions, 25 Stage 2 complaints were received and 13 succeeded wholly or in part. For residents dealing with homelessness, housing allocations, repairs or their landlord, that’s hardly small beer.

And it’s not all housing. Parking Stage 1 complaints went from five in 2024/25 to 29 in 2025/26. Benefits rose from nine to 25, Planning from 15 to 19, while Corporate Debt recorded 13. Complaint volumes alone can’t tell us why each service went up — and it’d be daft to pretend every complaint proves poor service — but the rebound plainly stretches beyond one team having a bad year.

What happened when people went outside the council?

This is where the Ombudsman evidence needs treating carefully rather than waving around a big number. FHDC’s 2024/25 report records nine determinations from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. Seven were closed after initial enquiries and two were not upheld. Some were rejected because there was another appeal route, others because they were too late, there wasn’t enough apparent fault to justify investigation, or the Ombudsman couldn’t achieve the outcome being sought. An Ombudsman referral isn’t the same thing as the council being found at fault.

But where the Ombudsman did find fault across the period, the cases are revealing. In May 2023, case 22 015 713 found that FHDC had failed to apply its housing allocations scheme correctly when considering a woman’s request for an extra bedroom. The council agreed to apologise, make a fresh decision and improve its service. In December that year, case 23 003 366 found fault in the council’s consideration of rooflight windows in a neighbouring development, causing a family “avoidable distress”; FHDC agreed to apologise.

Then came case 24 019 188, decided in July 2025. The Ombudsman rejected the substance of the resident’s planning complaints: it found no fault in how FHDC assessed or determined the applications or considered his objections. But it did find fault in the council’s handling of his formal complaint, causing “avoidable uncertainty and distress”. FHDC agreed to apologise within four weeks. That’s a useful distinction. The planning decision survived outside scrutiny; the complaints handling didn’t.

The Housing Ombudsman — a separate body dealing with council landlord complaints — produced considerably harsher findings in 2024/25. FHDC’s own appendix records one case of severe maladministration involving bathroom works and complaint handling, requiring an apology to the resident’s widow, £1,200 compensation to the resident’s estate and a review of the failures. Another case involving repairs, damp, mould and complaint handling resulted in a finding of maladministration, £1,500 compensation, a full property survey and consideration of whether the family needed temporarily moving while works were done.

Those cases matter because a simple count of LGSCO decisions doesn’t capture the full picture of complaints against a district council which is also a social landlord.

A “very strong” policy — but what about the service underneath it?

Here’s the rub. There’s little evidence that FHDC’s problem is simply that it hasn’t got a complaints policy. The council changed that policy in April 2025 to comply with the two Ombudsman complaint-handling codes. After reviewing it, the Housing Ombudsman concluded in April 2026 that the policy was overall “very strong”. It nevertheless recommended further clarification over what counts as a complaint, accessible formats, Stage 1 entry, acknowledgements and how complaints should be defined and logged.

In other words, you can have a sound rulebook and still get things wrong on the pitch.

FHDC’s own “learning log” rather gives the game away. It records upheld and partially upheld cases where, in the council’s own words, “we have got things wrong”. There were 53 lessons identified in 2024/25, with 28 involving housing. In 2025/26 the total rose to 62, of which 29 concerned housing. The themes weren’t obscure legal technicalities: communication and responsiveness, case management, administrative errors, customer care and contractor performance.

There’s another number worth keeping an eye on. FHDC distinguishes formal complaints from “service requests” — matters where someone is dissatisfied but the council believes the issue can be fixed without putting it through Stage 1. Those requests rose from 366 in 2023/24 to 378 in 2024/25, then dropped sharply to 283 in 2025/26, just as formal complaints went upwards. That doesn’t prove complaints have been wrongly classified in either direction; the published evidence simply isn’t enough to say that. But with 95 fewer service requests and 59 more Stage 1 complaints in a year, the boundary between the two is worth watching.

Political responsibility for complaint handling sits with Liberal Democrat Cllr Gary Fuller, Cabinet Member for Resident Engagement and Accountability and FHDC’s designated Member Responsible for Complaints. In September 2025, Fuller and the council’s Corporate Governance Board signed off the 2024/25 report as a “true and accurate reflection” of complaint handling and said the areas of non-compliance identified the previous year had been addressed.

The question for Fuller and FHDC isn’t whether every complainant is right. They plainly aren’t, and the Ombudsman decisions prove that too. Nor is it simply whether officers can get an answer out of the door within a target — FHDC says 100% of its housing Stage 1 and Stage 2 complaints met the relevant response times in 2025/26. Being on time and getting it right aren’t the same thing.

FHDC says it aims to settle complaints at Stage 1. Yet Stage 2 cases have risen from 32 to 60, a quarter of them were upheld or partly upheld, half of escalated landlord complaints succeeded wholly or in part, and the council recorded 62 separate lessons from things that went wrong. The real test now isn’t another policy document or another reassuring percentage. It’s whether fewer residents have reason to come back for a second answer next year.

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