Folkestone’s Folca 2: £13.2m to Bring Debenhams Back to Life — But Who’s Picking Up the Bill?

Folkestone’s former Debenhams has acquired another eye-watering price tag. On 19 October, Folkestone & Hythe District Council (FHDC) advertised a £9 million contract to fit out Folca 2 as a medical centre with commercial premises underneath. On Tuesday 27 October, its Planning Committee considers the refurbishment. Yet the biggest question isn’t where new doors will go. It’s whether the money is firmly in place.

There’s a difference between planning consent, a tender and a signed cheque. The £9m is an estimate excluding VAT, not an award or money already paid. Nor is it the whole project budget. The council’s mixed-use scheme has previously been costed at £13.2m.

Tuesday’s decision is narrower than the grand vision. Application 26/1453/FH concerns the Art Deco building’s exterior: three Sandgate Road entrances, five at the rear, ramps, glazing, a canopy, rooftop equipment, solar panels and historic repairs. Officers recommend approval, subject to 14 conditions. FHDC owns the building and is itself the applicant.

The upper floors are intended for Manor Clinic and Guildhall Street Surgery, replacing existing premises and accommodating around 23,000 registered patients. Commercial occupiers would take the floors below. That could benefit patients and a town centre badly needing footfall.

But FHDC’s September announcement said the GPs would move in “Subject to NHS approvals”. Those four words are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The NHS’s own current estates page still lists Folca 2 under “In development”, rather than projects already under way. Above that category it states: “All projects are subject to business case approval through NHS governance.” That isn’t abandonment. But support in principle isn’t proof of an authorised £5.6m contribution.

The council’s February timetable envisaged the NHS business-case and governance process running until November 2026. That deadline is approaching, yet the publicly available NHS project listing still doesn’t demonstrate that final approval has been obtained.

So where’s £13.2m supposed to come from? The funding mix previously reported from the draft February Cabinet business case was £5.6m in NHS/ICB capital, £3m in council borrowing, £2.2m from the government’s Levelling Up Fund, £1.4m in decarbonisation grant and £1m in Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) receipts. These are planned sources, not a bank statement showing every penny received.

The £2.2m is earmarked for Folca within the government-backed Folkestone – A Brighter Future programme. The decarbonisation grant award is approximately £1.44m, rounded to £1.4m in the funding model. CIL is infrastructure money raised from development. Borrowing, of course, must be financed and repaid.

Here’s the catch: the public February Cabinet report identifies all five funding streams, but not the figures in its financial tables. The breakdown above comes from Shepway Vox’s reporting on the draft. It’s not a verified account of money received.

The NHS contribution is the biggest slice, at roughly 42% of the proposed total. The February report says the council received a letter of support in principle on 12 December 2025, but also says the formal business case still had to go through NHS approvals. Officers described the intended arrangement as a Section 2 contract under the NHS Act 2006: NHS capital would help fund the fit-out, while FHDC delivered the building and charged a reduced rent in recognition of that investment.

That’s not a trivial detail. The model envisages an NHS nominations agreement, allowing it to nominate the GP occupiers, with a long-term arrangement potentially lasting 40 years. Lower medical-centre rent is part of the trade-off. The commercial floors are therefore important to the scheme’s income, but the council’s modelling also allows for empty premises and rent-free periods. Projected revenue isn’t guaranteed revenue.

Nor is the £9m tender appearing out of thin air. FHDC has already awarded AW Construction Services Ltd £2,420,696, excluding VAT, for earlier strip-out, weatherproofing and building-separation works. That award was about 21% above the original £2m tender estimate. It isn’t, on its own, evidence of a cost overrun: an estimate and the accepted contract price are different things.

Modus Construction Consultants also won a £104,325 contract for project management and surveying. Simply adding these awards to the £13.2m would be misleading: some should already sit within the budget. What’s missing is a public reconciliation of contracts, fees, contingencies and actual spending against that figure.

The new tender expects construction to run from April 2027 until September 2028, with scope for an extension to February 2029. Its £9m estimate includes an option to fit out ground-floor and basement commercial space, but the council says that element could be dropped if lease or sale agreements haven’t progressed. In other words, even what the winning contractor eventually builds may depend on deals that aren’t yet settled.

There’s another sentence buried in the tender that deserves attention. FHDC warns that local government reorganisation could alter its responsibilities or requirements, and reserves contractual rights to vary or end the arrangement. That’s a stated procurement risk, not a prediction that the works will be cancelled. But it rather underlines how much could change before the anticipated finish date.

Then comes the other million-pound question. A 2024 Folkestone Harbour Health Impact Assessment says the former Clinical Commissioning Group preferred “a financial contribution in the region of £1,008,000” for off-site town-centre primary care, rather than healthcare floorspace at the harbour. That is not automatically Folca money, and it is not the same funding mechanism as CIL.

Where was that developer contribution secured, how much became payable, has any of it been collected and what was it spent on? Crucially, has it been counted anywhere in Folca’s funding package? The assessment establishes an intention, not a receipt, a transfer to Folca or proof that two similarly sized sums are interchangeable.

The borrowing needs scrutiny too. February’s Cabinet report earmarks proceeds from sales of Folca 1 and the Civic Centre to repay debt. Yet a planned sale isn’t cash until completion. Without confirmed receipts and dates, the financing risk remains difficult to judge.

Should the NHS arrangement fall through, Cabinet has authorised a commercial-only fallback. That’s a contingency, not evidence that doctors are packing their bags. It would also mean revisiting the business model rather than simply pretending the missing NHS millions never existed.

The planning report records 127 neighbours consulted, two supportive letters and one objection. Officers gave the objection about GP parking no weight because there’s no change of permitted Class E use. That planning distinction doesn’t settle wider access or funding questions.

On Tuesday, councillors can decide whether the proposed changes to Folca’s exterior are acceptable. They cannot, by granting planning permission, sign off the NHS business case, secure a commercial tenant or turn an estimated tender value into a final bill.

Folkestone could finally get its much-needed medical centre and breathe life back into one of the town’s most conspicuous empty landmarks. But if the works stretch to the tender’s possible February 2029 extension, it’ll be more than nine years since Debenhams closed in January 2020. Almost a decade to bring a once-thriving town centre building back into use. And that finishing date is still more than two years away.

Nobody’s questioning the value of better GP facilities or restoring a building that’s been sitting empty for years. But with £9m of work now out to tender, the public deserves more than promises and architectural drawings. It deserves to know, down to the last pound, what’s been approved, what’s actually been paid, what’s still dependent on NHS sign-off and, most importantly, who’ll be left picking up the bill if the sums don’t add up.

After nearly a decade of waiting, Folkestone deserves more than another set of plans. The building’s future may be taking shape, but the money behind it still needs explaining.

The Shepway Vox Team

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