Folkestone & Hythe’s Temporary Accommodation Scandal: Can the Council’s Figures Be Trusted?

On 8 May 2025, Folkestone & Hythe District Council (FHDC) closed two Freedom of Information requests about temporary accommodation — the rooms, flats and houses it uses for people who have nowhere else to live. One response put spending for 2024/25 at £895,509.40. The other gave twelve monthly amounts which, added together, came to £922,509.40.

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A £27,000 difference. On the same day. For the same financial year.

In July, the council repeated the lower amount. By October, another FOI response put the bill at £938,857. It repeated that higher figure in August 2026. Across these answers, the gap between the lowest and highest is £43,347.60. There’s no accompanying reconciliation showing how one figure becomes another. These aren’t numbers dragged from an anonymous social media post. They’re the council’s own answers to people exercising their legal right to ask questions.

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Different answers aren’t automatically dishonest ones. A council might include different costs, correct an earlier error or record an invoice in a later accounting period. But if somebody asks how much was spent, surely the answer ought to explain what’s been counted?

Otherwise, an FOI response becomes less an explanation than another number for residents to argue about.

Then Another £194,000 Appeared

The confusion doesn’t stop at 2024/25. In August 2026, FHDC responded to a request for total temporary accommodation spending during 2025/26 with £1,956,456.39. Less than two months later, it published £2,150,769.86 as its total temporary accommodation expenditure for that same year.

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That’s another £194,313.47.

This time, the council offered an explanation.

The £1.956 million was the amount paid to outside accommodation providers. The £2.15 million included expenditure on accommodation owned by FHDC itself. Its October response acknowledges that the request differed from the way spending was ordinarily reported. In other words, the two figures measure different things. That is a valid accounting distinction — but one the council could have made clear from the outset.

The question isn’t whether councils can use different accounting measures. Of course they can. It’s why residents weren’t given a straightforward explanation of those measures alongside the figures in the first place. When one request for the total produces £1.956 million and another produces £2.15 million, the word total has become rather less helpful than it ought to be.

Follow the Money, Not the Guesswork

Rather than picking whichever FOI figure suits a headline, The Shepway Vox Team has gone back to FHDC’s own published Payments to Suppliers records. We examined the same two expenditure descriptions in each financial year: Bed & Breakfast Accommodation and Self Contained Nightly Lets.

Those records show payments rising from £282,418.25 in 2021/22 to £1,520,865.70 in 2025/26 — an increase of approximately 438%.

That’s an enormous increase.

But it’s important to be clear about what these numbers represent. They are recorded payments under two particular accounting headings, not necessarily the council’s entire temporary accommodation bill. Other costs, council-owned accommodation, smaller payments and accounting adjustments may sit elsewhere. Describing £1.52 million as all temporary accommodation expenditure would risk repeating the very mistake we’re questioning.

One supplier stands out.

Paramount Independent Property Services LLP received £2,888,442 under those two payment descriptions between April 2021 and September 2026 — approximately 69% of all the payments we identified. Separately, FHDC disclosed that it used 86 sites supplied by Paramount during calendar year 2025. That figure represents sites the council used, not necessarily all the properties Paramount operated.

A dominant supplier isn’t automatically evidence of poor value. But it is a compelling reason to examine the prices charged, how suppliers were selected, the quality of their properties and what alternatives FHDC considered.

And here the FOI responses become testable at the level of a single business.

In May 2024, FHDC told one requester it had spent £271,296 with Paramount during 2023/24. Yet under Self Contained Nightly Lets, its published supplier-payment records show £236,318.

That’s a difference of £34,978 — for one supplier, one financial year and one type of accommodation.

It’s not that nothing matches. The Hamlet Hotel (Kent) Ltd appears at £94,550 in both sets of records for 2023/24. That’s precisely why the Paramount difference deserves a proper reconciliation, invoice by invoice, rather than a shrug and yet another headline total.

People Aren’t Accounting Entries

The council’s figures don’t always agree on how many households it’s helped, either.

One FOI counted 392 households placed in temporary accommodation during calendar year 2025. Another referred to 436 households accommodated through private providers during the same. If both mean distinct households, they cannot both be right: the private-provider figure would exceed the overall total. If one counts repeat bookings and the other counts households just once, FHDC needs to say so.

Behind these arguments are families.

At 31 March 2026, FHDC recorded 132 households, including 155 children, in temporary accommodation. Forty-one households were outside the district. The longest recorded stays, measured later on 31 July, were 533, 528 and 430 days. For somebody waiting to find a stable home, that’s not an abstract spreadsheet problem. It’s everyday life.

Nor can FHDC separately identify how much its out-of-district placements cost. In an August 2026 response, it explained that its finance system doesn’t distinguish payments for accommodation inside the district from payments for accommodation outside it. A change to the housing IT system in July 2023 has also restricted access to older placement information.

Those are limitations the council itself acknowledges, not assumptions made by its critics.

Is There Any Truth in These Figures?

Our search of FHDC’s public FOI register returned 110 results relating to temporary accommodation. Across the relevant disclosures, we’ve identified repeated differences in spending totals, supplier figures and household counts. Some have plausible accounting explanations. Others remain unresolved.

This doesn’t prove that every FOI answer is false, or that anyone deliberately falsified records. It does establish that some of the council’s answers cannot presently be reconciled from the information it has published.

And that leaves residents entitled to ask a profoundly uncomfortable question: is there any truth in these figures that the council can actually demonstrate?

The remedy isn’t particularly complicated in principle. FHDC should publish a reconciled account identifying what each FOI total includes, how its figures were calculated, and which transactions and adjustments explain the differences. It should reconcile the Paramount payments, distinguish council-owned accommodation from external-provider costs, and publish the evidence behind the value-for-money assessments it says it undertakes.

Where an earlier FOI response was wrong, it should be publicly corrected.

Temporary accommodation is supposed to offer people some certainty when their lives have already been turned upside down. The council’s financial reporting should offer taxpayers at least a little of the same.

FHDC isn’t being asked to make the figures look good. It’s being asked to make them add up — and prove to the public why they should be believed.

The Shepway Vox Team

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