£9m Later, the Wait Is Still a Mystery: Folkestone & Hythe’s Disabled Facilities Grants

In 2018/19, Folkestone & Hythe District Council said there was “currently no waiting list” for its Disabled Facilities Grant scheme. Today, the council tells disabled residents that “there may be a waiting list for assessments.” That change has happened while the amount being spent on home adaptations has risen substantially.

Our reconstruction of FHDC’s capital accounts identifies at least £9.04 million of Disabled Facilities Grant expenditure across the nine financial years for which we can establish defensible outturn figures between 2016/17 and 2025/26. We’ve deliberately excluded 2019/20 because, although we found a £900,000 projection, we haven’t established a sufficiently reliable final figure. Spending rose from £648,000 in 2016/17 to a provisional £1.391 million in 2025/26.

A Disabled Facilities Grant — DFG for short — can pay for stairlifts, through-floor lifts, level-access showers, ramps, widened doors and even extensions. Under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, grants for the purposes specified in section 23 are mandatory where the legal conditions are satisfied. In Folkestone & Hythe, Kent County Council’s Occupational Therapists assess a person’s needs before their recommendations form the basis of the grant application.

The direction of travel is revealing. FHDC’s 2018/19 capital programme recorded £672,000 of DFG expenditure and specifically stated there was no waiting list. Following Covid disruption to assessments and works, expenditure climbed above £1 million, with subsequent capital reports describing catch-up activity on delayed adaptations.

It hasn’t dropped below £1 million since 2021/22.

For 2026/27, central Government has allocated £1,867,983 of DFG funding to Folkestone & Hythe — part of £24.039 million across Kent and £723 million nationally. But that £1.868 million shouldn’t simply be compared with the council’s direct DFG capital budget and any difference declared “missing”. DFG funding sits within the wider Better Care Fund and can support other services intended to keep older and disabled residents living independently.

That distinction is visible in the historic figures. The headline DFG/Better Care Fund allocation was substantially higher than direct DFG capital expenditure in several early years because funding could also be reallocated, carried forward or used for permitted related programmes.

The problem isn’t necessarily where the money is going. It’s how difficult the complete journey is for the public to follow. Government publishes the allocation; FHDC publishes capital budgets and outturns elsewhere; its policies describe the wider services that can use DFG funding. What residents don’t appear to get is one straightforward annual reconciliation showing the whole pot coming in and exactly how it was divided between mandatory adaptations, discretionary help, related services and money carried forward.

There’s another organisation in the middle of this story.

When an FHDC DFG referral is able to proceed, the council says the resident is offered a caseworker from Town & Country Home Improvement Agency, which manages cases on FHDC’s behalf. Town & Country says its HIA helps people apply for DFGs and supports older and vulnerable residents with adaptations that enable them to remain independent. Its service is available whether somebody is a Town & Country tenant or not.

The arrangement forms part of procurement DN709751, undertaken jointly by Folkestone & Hythe, Dover and Ashford councils. The tender covers services including grant and loan applications, hospital discharge, Home Enablement and hoarding support. It began on 1 July 2024 for five years, with an option for another two, and importantly says each council enters into its own direct contract with the successful provider. Dover’s Cabinet subsequently approved Town & Country Housing as that provider.

So how satisfied are Folkestone & Hythe residents whose DFG cases are being managed through Town & Country?

Its prominently published Tenant Satisfaction Measures don’t answer that question. Town & Country explicitly says the performance data measures services supplied to residents who rent from it and people living in its shared-ownership homes. For 2024/25, 2,255 Town & Country residents were interviewed. These are landlord TSMs, not satisfaction scores for everyone using the separately commissioned Home Improvement Agency.

That distinction matters. A homeowner in Hythe could have a wet room designed and project-managed by Town & Country’s HIA without ever being a Town & Country tenant. Likewise, Town & Country says its HIA operates across Kent, Medway and parts of East Sussex for people regardless of whether they live in a Town & Country property. Its TSM figures therefore cannot reasonably be used as a proxy for the experience of FHDC’s DFG customers.

Town & Country does refer on its website to separate customer-satisfaction surveys following “home improvement programmes”, but the same wording appears on its page about planned improvements to its own housing stock. We haven’t found published results which clearly isolate Folkestone & Hythe’s council-commissioned HIA or DFG customers.

That leaves a sizeable hole in the public picture. We can identify the money. We can identify the contracted organisation managing much of the resident-facing process. What we can’t readily see are FHDC-specific HIA figures showing customer satisfaction, complaints, average processing times or how long cases take through assessment, specification, approval, works and completion.

And waiting times matter because DFGs aren’t merely discretionary generosity. Government guidance states that a DFG is a mandatory grant and that refusing to accept applications because resources are insufficient is unlawful. A properly made application must be decided within the statutory six-month period, although that clock isn’t necessarily running while somebody is still waiting for the earlier Occupational Therapist assessment.

So the presence of an assessment waiting list doesn’t, by itself, establish that FHDC has breached the law.

But it does make the missing performance figures more important.

After at least £9 million of identifiable capital spending, a Government allocation approaching £1.9 million this year, and a council-commissioned HIA managing much of the process, residents ought to be able to see how many people are waiting, how long they’re waiting, how quickly Town & Country is progressing cases and what those customers think of the service.

The accounts can tell us how much money has moved.

What they still don’t tell the disabled resident waiting for a stairlift, wet room or accessible doorway is the number that matters most:

How much longer will I have to wait?

The Shepway Vox Team

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