Corrections

Last Updated: October 1, 2026

Kent Local News is committed to accuracy in all of our reporting. In accordance with the Standards Code adopted by Impress (Clause 1: Accuracy), we maintain this rolling 12-month record of all articles that have been amended to correct a significant inaccuracy, as required by Section 10.3 of the Impress Regulatory Scheme.

Where we identify or are notified of a significant inaccuracy in our published content, we will correct it promptly. All corrections are clearly marked on the relevant article and recorded below.

Corrections Log

1 October 2026 — Kent Council Scorecard: transparency scores, and Kent’s 14 councils, scored: Kent Local News publishes its first full Council Scorecard: a re-check of the Scorecard’s 3 July transparency audit found that it had missed information councils publish. The Scorecard and the article of 12 September 2026 said Tunbridge Wells Borough Council published spending data that was roughly 18 months out of date, short of the Transparency Code’s quarterly minimum, and that Maidstone Borough Council was the only Kent council with no downloadable spending files. Both statements were wrong. Tunbridge Wells publishes monthly spending files on its website, and Maidstone’s payments search returns downloadable quarterly files. The audit had also missed contracts registers, councillor allowances, freedom of information disclosure logs or open-data pages at Dartford, Gravesham, Folkestone & Hythe, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells and Kent County Council, and had misdated Medway’s organisation chart. Ten transparency scores have been corrected: Tunbridge Wells 43 to 72, Dartford 49 to 71, Maidstone 61 to 74, Tonbridge & Malling 66 to 74, Gravesham 70 to 75, Kent County Council 76 to 81, Canterbury 72 to 74, Folkestone & Hythe 72 to 74, Sevenoaks 72 to 74 and Medway 75 to 77. Each council’s Scorecard page carries the correction and the article has been corrected. We apologise to the councils concerned. Details are in the Scorecard’s methodology change log.

1 October 2026 — Kent Council Scorecard: school-system panel (Kent County Council and Medway): the panel had been compiled from secondary websites and contained further errors. The Kent County Council page said the area had 176 Outstanding schools and that 89% of secondary and 92% of primary schools were rated Good or Outstanding; Ofsted’s data shows 59 Outstanding schools, with 86.9% of secondary and 96.6% of primary schools that hold a grade rated Good or Outstanding. The Medway page said its share of Good or Outstanding schools was below the Kent average; it is above it (96.6% against 94.8%). All eight cells of the panel are now taken from Ofsted and Department for Education statistics and scored on a stated basis, which moves the Kent Ofsted cell from 80 to 56 and the Medway Ofsted cell from 60 to 57. The panel is not a score of either council. Details are in the Scorecard’s methodology change log.

1 October 2026 — Kent Council Scorecard: Medway: the school-system panel on the Medway page said 29.27% of pupils achieved grade 5 or above in English and maths at GCSE, against 30.84% for England. Those figures came from a secondary source and were wrong. The Department for Education’s figures are 44.1% for Medway against 45.4% for England in 2024/25. The note has been corrected and a correction line added.

1 October 2026 — Kent Council Scorecard and Kent’s 14 councils, scored: Kent Local News publishes its first full Council Scorecard: the Scorecard’s first quarterly refresh, published on 10 September 2026, and the article of 12 September 2026 announcing it, said that no council had responded to the right of reply offered on 6 July 2026. That was wrong. Ashford Borough Council responded on 13 July 2026 and Kent County Council on 21 July 2026, both within the window; the responses reached Kent Local News and were not taken into account before publication. Both responses are now published word for word beside the scores they concern. Arising from them, two Transparency scores were corrected: Ashford from 71 to 81, because the council publishes a contracts register, and Kent County Council from 71 to 76, because the council publishes a freedom of information disclosure log. The Scorecard and the article also said that 12 of Kent’s 14 councils published no freedom of information performance statistics. That was also wrong: Ashford publishes them, and a re-check found figures published by Thanet, Maidstone and Tonbridge & Malling, older figures from Canterbury and Dartford, and an updated statistics page at Swale. The notes on those councils’ Scorecard pages have been corrected. The article has been corrected and a correction notice added, and a full account is in the Scorecard’s methodology change log.

30 September 2026 — Maidstone Council Objects to Quarry Plan That Could Destroy Ancient Woodland: an earlier version of this article, published on 18 September 2026, said the consultation on Kent County Council’s draft Mineral Sites Plan closed on 10 September 2026 and that residents no longer had a direct say. The consultation had been extended and closes at 11.59pm on Monday 5 October 2026. The article has been corrected and a correction notice added.

27 September 2026 — Motorcyclist dies after collision with car on A2 near Teynham: an earlier version of this article, published on 26 September 2026, gave an incorrect telephone number for witnesses to contact Kent Police. The correct number, given in the Kent Police appeal, is 01622 798538. The number has been corrected in the article and a correction notice has been added.

26 September 2026 — FA Trophy rounds misdescribed in 11 automated football articles. Eleven automated match reports and previews published between 12 and 26 September 2026 described FA Trophy qualifying-round ties as semi-finals or as the final, and stated that Kent clubs had reached the final or, in two cases, won the trophy. The ties were in fact second qualifying round (12 September) and third qualifying round (26 September) matches; the round names had been mislabelled in the data feed from which the articles were compiled. The articles were withdrawn on 26 September, corrected with the right rounds and republished with a correction notice. Passages in the match reports describing the course of play, which were not supported by the match data, were removed, and three previews had further errors corrected. The automated process has been changed so that it no longer uses round names from this feed for the FA Trophy and may not describe a cup stage that the data does not confirm. The corrected articles are: Ashford United 3-1 Ascot United; Herne Bay 0-1 Southall; Faversham Town 6-2 Horley Town; Deal Town 3-0 Sheppey United; Erith Town 2-0 Eastbourne Town; Preview: Cheshunt vs Cray Wanderers; Preview: Leatherhead vs Ramsgate; Kent derby: Ashford United vs Deal Town; Dartford 3-0 Leiston; Chatham Town 1-3 Berkhamsted; Faversham Town 2-0 Stanway Rovers.

27 August 2026 — Gillingham HMO bid recommended for refusal as house deemed too small and rooms fall below national space standards: an earlier version of this article, published on 27 August 2026, was headlined “Gillingham HMO bid refused…” and its summary stated that Medway Council’s planning committee had “considered and refused” the application. The committee papers on which the article was based record a recommendation of refusal by planning officers; the committee’s own decision on application MC/26/1032 had not been published at the time of writing. The headline and summary have been amended to refer to the officer recommendation, a correction notice has been added to the article, and the article now also reports the amended reasons for refusal set out in the council’s supplementary agenda.

10 July 2026 — Removal of 34 automated articles. A review of articles generated by an automated news-sourcing process between 2 and 9 July 2026 found that the process could introduce significant inaccuracies when it was unable to retrieve the full text of the official source it was reporting on. Thirty-four affected articles — principally police and council stories — were removed from publication on 10 July 2026, and the associated social media posts were deleted. Two further articles (a county-lines enforcement report and a proceeds-of-crime confiscation report) were checked against their official sources, corrected where required, and remain published with source links added. The automated process has been fixed so that articles are generated only from retrieved source text, and any story whose source text cannot be retrieved is held for human review before publication. We apologise for these errors.

10 July 2026 — Kent Police Release Image After Woman Followed and Filmed in Hoo: an earlier version of this article, published on 9 July 2026, incorrectly reported that a school-age girl had been accosted in Hoo and framed the incident as a child-safeguarding matter. Kent Police’s appeal — the source for the story — states that a woman was followed and allegedly photographed and filmed on Ratcliffe Highway on 5 July 2026. The article has been rewritten to reflect the source, the headline amended, and a correction notice added to the article.

This page is reviewed and updated on an ongoing basis. Entries older than 12 months are removed.

How to Report an Inaccuracy

If you believe we have published inaccurate information, please contact us at newshound@kentlocalnews.co.uk or visit our Complaints page for full details on how to submit a complaint.

Kent Local News is regulated by Impress, the independent monitor for the press.