Lower Leas Coastal Park Playground: How a £750,000 Budget Grew to More Than £1.38 Million

It was supposed to be a £750,000 playground.

That was the budget Folkestone & Hythe District Council approved in May 2025 for the long-awaited replacement of the ageing play area at Lower Leas Coastal Park. Councillors increased the previous £559,000 allocation by £191,000 and expressly agreed that the project budget would remain at £750,000.

The £750,000 didn’t survive the paperwork.

By April 2026, FHDC’s own financial records were showing a purchase order for the main playground contractor, Proludic Ltd, of £816,000. FHDC tells the public that its purchase-order figures are excluding VAT and represent the amount it expects to purchase from a supplier. Add 20% VAT to £816,000 and the figure becomes £979,200.

And that was just Proludic.

To understand how we got there, you have to go back to the contract itself. Proludic won the job to design, supply and install the replacement playground. The published contract award was £680,000. Yet when FHDC raised its purchase order in January 2026, the expected purchase was already £710,000. Three months later, the council’s records showed £816,000.

Forget procurement jargon for a moment. The important bit is simple.

A purchase order is the council telling a supplier what it expects to buy and how much it expects that purchase to be worth. FHDC says so itself. It also says purchase orders are amended if the value of the purchase changes.

So we have a playground budget of £750,000, a published contract award of £680,000, then a purchase order of £710,000, followed by one for £816,000.

Even before adding VAT, that final published figure is £66,000 over the entire playground budget, or 8.8%.

Including 20% VAT, the £816,000 purchase order becomes £979,200 — 30.6% above the original £750,000 budget. Put another way, that is £229,200 more than the £750,000 figure residents have repeatedly heard attached to the scheme. There is an important question here because £816,000 is also exactly £680,000 plus 20% VAT. If FHDC inadvertently published a VAT-inclusive figure, its website description of the data is wrong. If its published rules are correct and £816,000 really is excluding VAT, the expected cost had risen considerably. FHDC needs to explain which it is.

But there was another problem underneath all of this.

Or rather, above it.

The cliff.

Two landslides hit the Leas during the wet autumn and winter of 2023/24, including the slope immediately above the playground. The council couldn’t simply rip out the old equipment and put the shiny new playground in its place. Its own officers said access to the landslip required removal of the existing play area and stated bluntly that the new play couldn’t be installed until the cliff stabilisation works had been completed.

That makes the cliff bill difficult to separate from the story of what it took to get the playground open.

FHDC eventually allocated £400,000 to the Lower Leas landslip engineering works. That sat alongside the £750,000 playground budget in the council’s capital programme. Between them, the two linked projects had therefore reached £1.15 million of approved capital budget before we even start following individual invoices and orders.

CAN Geotechnical Ltd was brought in for the cliff.

Its procurement was advertised at £250,000 excluding VAT. By March 2026 the council’s purchase order for the work stood at £205,501.52.

Then that figure moved too.

In April, FHDC’s published purchase-order records showed £291,697 against CAN’s cliff-stabilisation work. On the council’s stated basis that purchase orders exclude VAT, that becomes £350,036.40 including 20% VAT.

Put Proludic and CAN together and the scale of the work suddenly looks very different from the familiar £750,000 headline.

The latest project-specific purchase orders we have identified are £816,000 for Proludic and £291,697 for CAN Geotechnical.

Together they come to £1,107,697 excluding VAT.

At 20% VAT, that’s £1,329,236.40.

And still we haven’t reached the beginning of the story.

Before either main contractor got going, money was already being spent finding out what needed doing and preparing the site.

FHDC commissioned the survey and engineering work needed to understand the unstable cliff. Its Cabinet papers record a £6,550 Lidar drone survey, a £2,800 visual slope assessment, a £7,940 options appraisal and further technical design work. The council said commissions already undertaken had been funded from existing revenue budgets.

The purchase-order trail lets us put names to some of it.

There was £6,550 to J C White Geomatics, matching the Lidar survey figure. There was £9,950 to Mark Hanton Studio for the Coastal Park Play Area, £22,380 to Tony Gee & Partners for the cliff-stabilisation work and £9,500 to Capel Groundworks for the play-area project. Those four identifiable orders alone add another £48,380 excluding VAT, or £58,056 at 20% VAT.

So the conservative trail we can presently identify is this:

£1,107,697 in the latest purchase orders for Proludic and CAN, plus £48,380 of clearly identifiable survey, design and enabling orders.

That takes us to £1,156,077 excluding VAT.

At 20% VAT, that rises to £1,387,292.40 — £637,292.40 more than the original £750,000 budget, or 84.97% higher.

That isn’t the same as saying FHDC has already handed over £1.387 million. It hasn’t. Purchase orders show expected purchases; payments to suppliers show money actually paid. FHDC publishes those payments separately and, unlike its purchase orders, the payment figures include VAT. Adding the two datasets together would count some of the same money twice.

But the payments show that hundreds of thousands of pounds have already gone out of the door.

Across the suppliers we have been able to link confidently to the playground, cliff, design, survey and enabling work, the published payment records through August show £649,757.33 including VAT paid. That is not the final bill: further invoices, retentions and final accounts may still follow.

Nor have we thrown every vaguely related Coastal Park order into the total to make the number bigger. We’ve excluded entries where the description isn’t strong enough to prove the connection, including other furniture, lighting and miscellaneous orders.

What remains is the conservative figure.

The council approved £750,000 for the playground.

Its own later financial records show £816,000 against the main playground purchase order.

The council also says the playground couldn’t be installed until the separate cliff work was done, and the latest CAN purchase order we found was £291,697.

Then there were the surveys, engineers, designers and groundwork that came before them.

The final cost still needs one thing we don’t yet have: the completed final accounts and all of the contract variations. Those should tell us exactly why the Proludic and CAN figures changed and settle whether FHDC’s April purchase-order figures really were excluding VAT, as its website says.

But £750,000 no longer describes the financial story.

It was the budget.

The paper trail tells a much bigger one.

The Shepway Vox Team

Discernibly Different Dissent