Kent found almost £100m of savings. It still overspent by £23m.
Adult social care keeps driving the deficit, as Kent weighs new homes, water restrictions and fire cover
Kent County Council found nearly £100m in savings last year but still ended £22.7m over budget, as adult social care, SEND and other statutory services continue to outpace cuts elsewhere. Plus 2,500 homes approved near Bobbing, a South East Water hosepipe ban, paused fire station cuts, Curzon exits one part of Canterbury, and the rest of the week across Kent.
Kent found almost £100m of savings. It still overspent by £23m.
Kent County Council found almost £100m of savings last year.
It still overspent by £22.7m.
The council’s latest finance report shows an authority that is getting better at controlling parts of its budget but still cannot keep pace with the rising costs of its largest services. County Hall is not struggling because nobody is trying to save money. It is finding more savings than it did a year ago. The problem is that adult social care, SEND and other statutory services continue to grow faster than the council can cut elsewhere.
KCC ended 2025/26 £22.7m over budget, slightly worse than the £20.2m overspend recorded the year before. The gap will again be covered from reserves.
On its own, that sounds like another bleak annual report from a council that has spent years warning about the pressure on its finances. Read a little further, though, and the picture becomes less straightforward.
The council delivered £98.6m of savings and additional income during the year, up from £73.3m in 2024/25. It also improved its forecast position by almost £14m in the final quarter, after tightening spending controls, restricting recruitment and requiring higher levels of approval for agency staff, requisitions and new posts.
Several parts of the council came in under budget. Growth, Environment and Transport underspent. The Chief Executive’s Department underspent. The Deputy Chief Executive’s Department underspent. Non-Attributable Costs, the part of the budget that includes items such as borrowing and investment income, also contributed to the overall position.
Even adult social care, still the largest pressure on the council’s budget, improved slightly. It overspent by £42.9m in 2025/26, down from £46.4m the year before.
The problem is that £42.9m remains a significant overspend.
Adult social care remains the area where Kent’s budget faces the hardest limits. The report points to rising care costs, more complex needs and savings that proved impossible to deliver during the year. Almost half of the adult social care overspend came from savings that were not achieved. The rest was driven largely by the cost of providing care placements.
The council can slow recruitment. It can hold vacancies open. It can delay projects, squeeze discretionary spending, and push departments to find additional revenue. It cannot decide that fewer older residents need care.
This is the central problem running through the report. KCC is saving money in one part of the organisation while demand rises in another. The savings are real, but so are the pressures.
The scale of the savings target shows how difficult the position has become. Kent needed to deliver £121.5m of savings and additional income last year, partly because undelivered savings from previous years had been rolled forward. It delivered £98.6m.
That would be a major achievement in almost any other context. For KCC, it still left a £22.7m hole.
Then there is Special Educational Needs.
The Dedicated Schools Grant deficit has climbed from £97.5m to £130.5m in a year, despite continued government support through Kent’s Safety Valve agreement. The pressure is being driven by high demand for additional special educational needs support and greater need for specialist provision.
Again, the council has some room to act, but not complete control. It can review packages, try to create more places locally and reform the system over time. It cannot quickly reverse the rise in demand from children and families who need support now.
That is why the SEND deficit sits behind the main council budget as one of the biggest long-term risks facing County Hall. It is not the same as the £22.7m revenue overspend, but it points in the same direction. The services with the greatest pressure are the ones least easily controlled by annual savings exercises.
Politically, the timing is awkward.
Many of the figures will be a result of the final year of Conservative control. Reform took charge of Kent County Council in May, after the financial year had already ended, so the £22.7m overspend is not purely a verdict on how the new administration has managed the council’s finances.
Reform did not create these pressures, but it came into office promising a different way of running County Hall. These figures show how difficult that will be. The council is already finding large savings, already tightening spending controls, and already leaning on reserves when the numbers do not add up.
If Reform wants to go further, it will have to show where the extra savings come from, which services change, and how it intends to manage adult social care and SEND differently from the administrations before it.
Inheritance is part of the story, but it is not an exit route.
The latest report does not show a council doing nothing. It shows the opposite. Kent found more savings than the year before, tightened controls, and sharply reduced its expected overspend in the final months of the year.
It still ended up in the red.
Kent has spent years trying to cut its way back to financial stability. The latest figures suggest it is getting better at doing exactly that.
The problem is that the biggest bills are still growing faster.
Catch up
There was a huge response to our piece on the never-ending saga of Galley Hill Road, which collapsed in 2023, but now has a glimmer of hope that it might be fixed. In several more years. It's a sprawling piece on what happens when critical infrastructure breaks, no one wants to take responsibility for it, and barely anyone has the resources to do anything about it.
Ed Jennings
For our big weekend interview, we sat down with Ian Watson, a club promoter and debut novelist who has spent much of his life in and around Kent. I used to regularly attend Ian's legendary How Does It Feel To Be Loved? club night in London over a decade ago, and I'm very excited to get stuck into his first novel.
Steven Keevil
Covering Kent properly takes time, travel and a fair amount of patience
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Council matters
Meetings this week:
- Medway: Cabinet meets on Tuesday to discuss developer contributions, a mobile home policy, and the disposal of the Innovation Park Medway northern site to a mystery company that might want to take on a message plot of land right next to an ever-expanding BAE Systems.
- Canterbury: Cabinet gathers on Tuesday to discuss a housing strategy, finances, South East Water, and more.
- Medway: Planning Committee is set to refuse an application for 150 new homes east of Rainham on Wednesday.
- Maidstone: Council will discuss the creation of a Maidstone Town Council and more on Wednesday.
New planning applications:
- Ashford: 160 new homes, office, and a bridge over the River Stour.
- Ashford: Conversion of former council offices into 58 flats.
- Maidstone: 30 new homes in Harrietsham.
- Sevenoaks: Demolition of buildings and 26 new homes.
In brief
🏗️ 2,500 new homes, a local centre, school, a GP surgery, and sports facilities have been approved to the west of Bobbing.
🚍 Buses will continue to run between Bluewater and London after Transport for London and Kent County Council came to an agreement over fees to use Fastrack bus lanes.
🌩️ Lightning strikes caused fires in Maidstone and Faversham during last week's storms.
🥀 Dover MP Mike Tapp has been making friends in the Home Office.
👷 Southern Water has begun work on a 15 month project to futureproof water mains on the Isle of Sheppey.
🚰 South East Water have imposed a temporary hosepipe ban.
🚒 Plans to cut fire stations have been paused to allow the proposals to be examined further.
🚓 Kent Police are delighted after a van driver assisted an armed officer chasing a suspect in Thanet.
🪧 Protesters have been calling for Kent's last remaining dog racing track to be shut down.
📽️ Curzon is to close its Westgate cinema in Canterbury to focus on its soulless Riverside venue.
🖼️ Creative Folkestone has a new Chief Executive.
🍞 The excellent Docker Bakery is set to open a new venue in Dover in August.
🍷 The Observer likes Keller in Whitstable.
🎥 Scenes from the upcoming season of Apple TV's Silo were filmed in Kent.
The Kent Current is now on WhatsApp
We’ve launched a WhatsApp channel for Kent Current. We won’t flood it with posts, but we will use it to share new stories and occasional major updates from across the county.
If you’d like our journalism somewhere a little closer to your lock screen, you can follow along there.
Property of the week
This is a detached home on Reservoir Road in Whitstable, close to the harbour, station and High Street, which is already doing a fair bit of work before you even get inside. The property has four double bedrooms, including a ground-floor main bedroom with an en suite and walk-in wardrobe, plus a large kitchen and dining room with a log burner, a separate lounge with an open fireplace, and a west-facing garden with a pergola and log cabin. The real twist sits at the back, where the sale includes ownership of an access road, giving vehicular access to a large detached workshop with its own WC and sink. There are also solar panels with battery storage and a feed-in tariff, which the listing says returns around £1,000 a year, so at least one part of owning a house in Whitstable is trying to pay you back. It is available for £675,000.
Events this week
🏎️ Wed 1 Jul - Evening With Nigel Mansell // Former Formula 1 champion shares stories of his career in motorsport. Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells. Tickets from £48.25.
🏰 3 - 5 Jul - Rochester Castle Live // Three days of outdoor concerts, headlined by Ministry of Sound Classical, The Libertines, and McFly. Rochester Castle Gardens. Tickets from £32.50.
Footnotes
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