Folkestone & Hythe District Council: A Formula One Finance System, a Broken Reply Button and Accounts the Public Can’t Fully Inspect

Folkestone & Hythe District Council has a new finance system, a £650,000 project budget and a legal duty to let the public inspect its accounts. Yet 90 days after the inspection period closed, A member of The Shepway Vox Team is still waiting for the records they requested. The council acknowledged the requests. Then apparently disappeared into a black hole. Even the old Conservative administration never kept us waiting this long.

Somewhere inside Folkestone’s Civic Centre, there may be an email inbox containing our requests to inspect the council’s 2025/26 accounts. By now, they could have gathered enough digital dust to qualify for their own heritage protection.

During July and August, a member of The Shepway Vox Team submitted requests under Section 26 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. This gives journalists and interested people the right to inspect accounting records, contracts, invoices, receipts and other supporting documents. Not a favour. Not a privilege. A legal right.

The council acknowledged receiving the requests with this reassuring little masterpiece:

Thank you for completing the public inspection request, your details have been passed to the relevant team to be actioned.

Wonderful. The requests had been passed to the relevant team. Action was apparently on its way. We could almost hear the machinery of local government springing into life.

Then absolutely nothing.

The inspection period closed on 11 August. Today is 11 November. That’s 92 calendar days, or exactly 3 calendar months without a substantive response, a single requested document or even an explanation.

It’s rather like ordering dinner, receiving a receipt and being told the chef has been informed. Three months later, you’re still staring at an empty plate.

The council’s published inspection guidance states:

We aim to respond within 5 working days to an individual query.

It adds that complicated requests may take longer. Fair enough. But five working days and nearly three months are rather different things. One is a reasonable target. The other is roughly how long it takes a council email to develop a pension entitlement.

We’ve experienced difficulties inspecting accounts before. But never silence on this scale. Even under the old Conservative administration, we never encountered anything quite like it.

And goodness knows, they weren’t exactly famous for throwing open the filing cabinets and shouting, “Help yourselves!”

A Formula One car with a rather peculiar engine

Here’s where our little tale of administrative excellence takes an interesting turn.

In April 2025, Folkestone & Hythe approved a combined £560,000 capital budget to replace its ageing finance and asset management systems.

Both had been around for more than 25 years, relying on spreadsheets, emails, paperwork and manual workarounds. The replacement, supplied by TechnologyOne, was supposed to improve how financial information was recorded, found and managed.

By June 2026, the council’s published figures showed a £650,000 financial system project budget, with £460,000 spent and the project assessed as 85% complete at the end of March.

Separately, the TechnologyOne software contract has a published four-year value of £770,922. These figures cover different costs and periods, so they cannot simply be added together or treated as proof of overspending.

But the financial paperwork doesn’t end there.

A separate £170,000 support contract was awarded to Moore Stephens Insight Ltd. Further contracts included £15,300 for archiving financial data and £35,000 for support after the new system went live. Some costs may already be covered within existing project budgets.

That’s a substantial investment in managing the council’s finances.

In April 2026, Cabinet Member for Finance Cllr Tim Prater (pictured) was positively glowing about the new system.

He praised the finance team, describing the change as:

like watching someone change the engine on a Formula 1 car while it’s still moving…

Marvellous stuff. High-speed engineering. Precision. A finely tuned machine roaring towards financial glory.

Unfortunately, while the engine was apparently being changed at 200mph, somebody seems to have forgotten the rather less demanding task of answering an email.

Perhaps our  team member’s inspection requests are still strapped to the roof rack, hurtling towards the next financial year.

The new system may well be an improvement. It certainly needed replacing. But buying modern software doesn’t automatically produce openness, any more than buying a grand piano turns somebody into Mozart.

And the auditors themselves had concerns.

Even the auditors were left waiting

In March 2026, Grant Thornton identified the move to TechnologyOne as a significant audit risk.

Transferring financial records from one system to another can introduce errors. The auditors therefore planned additional checks to ensure that the information transferred was complete and accurate.

That was a warning about possible errors, not a finding that errors had occurred.

Then, at the Audit and Governance Committee meeting on 29 July, councillors heard something rather revealing.

At the Audit and Governance Committee meeting on 29 July 2026, councillors were told that working papers and supporting evidence needed for Grant Thornton’s audit of the 2025/26 accounts were not all ready for the auditors’ sampling exercise on 1 July. The delay was largely attributed to the introduction of the council’s new Financial Management System. Grant Thornton audit partner Paul Dossett acknowledged that the audit was running slightly behind schedule but said the lost time could be recovered.

So the external auditors were encountering delays obtaining financial evidence.

And we are still waiting for ours.

Are the two connected? We don’t know.

Perhaps somebody at the Civic Centre could explain. Preferably before the next geological era.

Millions of pounds that need explaining

There’s a reason we want to inspect the underlying records.

Our preliminary forensic review of the council’s draft 2025/26 accounts identified several differences that deserve proper explanations.

Two major Group financial statements contain a £4.135 million difference between figures that need reconciling. Group investment figures differ by £1.072 million. There’s also a £269,000 difference between published cash disclosures.

Then there’s Oportunitas Ltd, the council-owned property company.

One accounting note records outstanding loans of £4.7 million. Another gives £6.267 million. That’s a £1.567 million difference.

There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation involving different accounting treatments. Unfortunately, the published draft doesn’t provide it.

Elsewhere, figures have been printed under the wrong financial years, while a note supposedly explaining long-term debtors has no supporting table.

Perhaps the missing table has gone on holiday with our unanswered inspection requests. We hope they’re having a lovely time.

Let’s be absolutely clear. These differences do not establish fraud, missing money or unlawful expenditure. Some may have legitimate explanations. Others appear to be ordinary mistakes.

But we would rather inspect the evidence than participate in a taxpayer-funded edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, where the figures don’t match and nobody is allowed to phone a friend.

Transparency is easy. Until somebody asks to see something.

Information is power. Whoever controls it decides what the rest of us can know, question and challenge.

And when that information concerns millions of pounds of public money, it doesn’t belong exclusively to those sitting behind desks at the Civic Centre.

The council has published its draft accounts. Lovely. But publishing financial figures containing unexplained differences, then failing to provide the supporting records, isn’t meaningful transparency.

It’s rather like inviting somebody to inspect your house, showing them a photograph of the front door and then refusing to hand over the keys.

Real openness begins when people ask awkward questions. Particularly questions the council might prefer not to answer.

After all, democracy is supposed to involve considerably more than putting a cross on a ballot paper every four years and trusting that everything happening behind the Civic Centre’s doors is absolutely splendid.

The right to inspect public accounts dates back to 1844. It exists because the people paying the bills must be able to examine how their money is spent.

In Moss v Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames [2021], the High Court made clear that councils cannot refuse Section 26 inspection requests merely because providing documents would take too much staff time.

Rather wonderfully, Folkestone & Hythe Council managed to cite the wrong section of the law in not one, but two official documents explaining the public’s right to inspect its accounts. Both direct readers to Section 25 when describing the right to inspect supporting accounting records. That right is actually contained in Section 26.

Perhaps before spending hundreds of thousands of pounds modernising its finance system, somebody could have invested five minutes checking which bit of the law applies. After all, it is rather difficult to inspire confidence in financial accuracy when the council cannot even get the section number right.

Four people. One question. Still waiting.

There are people with clear responsibilities for the council’s finances and public accountability – all pictured below.

Alan Mitchell is the Director of Finance and statutory Section 151 officer.

Cllr Tim Prater is the Cabinet Member for Finance and Governance.

Cllr Liz McShane chairs Audit and Governance.

And Cllr Jim Martin leads the council.

Then there’s Paul Dossett of Grant Thornton (pictured), the external auditor who attended the July Audit and Governance Committee meeting.

He isn’t responsible for answering the council’s inspection requests. Nevertheless, difficulties accessing the records underpinning the accounts should concern anyone responsible for public audit.

Surely, between the senior officers, elected councillors, expensive computer systems and external auditors, somebody knows where our requests have gone.

Perhaps they’re stored in a folder marked To Be Dealt With After Everyone Has Forgotten About Them.

We are not alleging that anyone has deliberately concealed documents. We have no evidence of that.

But after 92 days without a substantive response, one might reasonably begin wondering whether there’s something in the 2025/26 accounts the council would rather nobody examined too closely.

There may be nothing whatsoever to hide.

If so, the solution is remarkably uncomplicated.

Explain the delay. Arrange access to the records. Answer the questions.

No new software contract required. No consultants. No Formula One pit crew.

Just somebody willing to deal with a lawful request.

Because the real problem isn’t necessarily a mistake in the accounts. Mistakes can be corrected. Figures can be reconciled. Questions can be answered.

The much bigger issue is what happens when a council lets the public’s opportunity to inspect its finances pass without providing the requested records.

Are we citizens, entitled to examine what happens to our money?

Or merely spectators, expected to applaud from the sidelines while officials such as the CEO, Dr Priest. or Council Leader, Jim Martin, decide what we may see?

Folkestone & Hythe has found the money for a modern finance system. It has found the time to praise the software and the people installing it.

Surely, somewhere in that £650,000 project budget, there must be room for a functioning reply button.

And if the council cannot manage something that simple, perhaps its next great technological breakthrough should be a carrier pigeon.

At least that might deliver something.

The Shepway Vox Team

Delivering Dissent Since 2015