Ashford Borough Council has the best freedom of information record in Kent and wins the Scorecard’s award for the most open council, but scores in band D for complaints and housing, on the Kent Council Scorecard’s October 2026 refresh.
Declaration: Kent Local News is edited by Daniel Dabin, who is also the leader of the GB Freedom party. The Scorecard is scored from published data under a published methodology, every council receives its scores for right of reply before publication, and every score links to its source so that readers can check it.
Ashford Borough Council, which serves about 134,000 people in Ashford, Tenterden and the surrounding villages, is scored on eight measures in the October refresh of the Kent Council Scorecard. It scores in band A on one, band B on two, band C on three and band D on two. This is the third of 14 pieces, one for each Kent council.
Scores run from 0 to 100 and are banded A to F. They are never added together, because each measures a different service with different data. The full evidence for every score is on the Ashford Borough Council page.
The scores at a glance
| Measure | Score | Band | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refuse collection | 68 | C | 2nd of 13 |
| Complaints handling | 52 | D | joint 9th of 14 |
| Freedom of information | 92 | A | 1st of 13 scored |
| Financial health | 65 | C | joint 4th of 14 |
| Transparency | 81 | B | joint 2nd of 14 |
| Planning | 61 | C | 9th of 13 |
| Housing and homelessness | 45 | D | joint 10th of 13 |
| Manifesto delivery (Trust) | 75 | B | joint 3rd of 14 |
Education, safeguarding, highways and adult social care are run by Kent County Council, so they do not apply to Ashford.
Where it does best
Ashford wins the Kent Council Scorecard Award for the most open council, with 92, ahead of Sevenoaks on 91. It answered 99.6% of freedom of information requests within the legal limit of 20 working days in 2025-26 (974 of 978), and the Information Commissioner issued no decision notices against it in three years. It publishes its own figures every quarter, and answered Kent Local News’s request on the day it was made by pointing to them.
On bins, it is second in Kent with 68. It recycled 48.8% of household waste in 2024-25, well above the England average of 42.0%.
On transparency, it scores 81, joint second with Kent County Council. It publishes an open-data section, its freedom of information responses, a contracts register, councillors’ allowances and senior pay. Its spending data is published quarterly rather than monthly.
On finances, it scores 65, joint fourth. It ended 2025-26 with a deficit of £183,000, 0.8% of its £22.1m net budget, and its usable general fund reserves rose by £7.1m to £40.3m. Its Band D council tax of £199.37 is the second lowest of Kent’s 12 districts.
Where it falls short
On housing, it scores 45. On prevention, 36.9% of homelessness prevention cases in 2024-25 ended with a home secured for at least six months, against 51.9% for England. It completed 309 affordable homes in the three years to March 2025, 11.1% of the homes the Housing Delivery Test required, against a Kent median of 17.2%. The test result adds a 20% buffer to its housing land supply requirement.
On planning, it decided all 67 of its major applications on time, but 7.9% of its major decisions were overturned at appeal, against 3.2% for England, and it issued three formal enforcement notices in the year to June 2026.
On complaints, the Ombudsman upheld all three Ashford complaints it investigated in 2025-26. The numbers for district councils are very small, so the score rests on the rate per 100,000 residents, 2.1 against a district average of 1.0, and on how the council dealt with the cases.
Its auditor made one key recommendation, on the medium-term sustainability of the council’s housing revenue account.
Promises
The Trust score of 75, joint third in Kent, combines KLN’s tracking of the administration’s pledges with whether its actions match the issues residents raise. Of four pledges tracked, two are kept, a cabinet post for climate, environment and transport and a cross-party joint administration, one is partly kept, carbon neutrality for the council’s own estate by 2030, and one is still pending.
Who was in charge
A minority administration of the Ashford Independents and the Green Party, led by Noel Ovenden, has run the council since May 2023. Almost all the data falls under it. The three-year housing supply figures also span the previous Conservative-led administration.
What the council said
Ashford was one of two councils to respond to the first refresh, on 13 July. It pointed to the performance reports, complaints reports and freedom of information statistics it publishes, and to its contracts register and its supplier spending data, which it said covers all expenditure. Kent Local News failed to take that response into account before the September publication. When it was, the transparency score was corrected from 71 to 81, and the freedom of information note was corrected to say the council does publish its statistics. Its responses are published in full on its Scorecard page.
The council was sent its October scores on 2 October. It did not respond.
What it means for Ashford and Tenterden
Ashford Borough Council collects the bins, decides planning applications and handles housing and homelessness across the borough. Kent County Council runs schools, social care and roads. Local news is on the Ashford and Tenterden news pages, and the Scorecard hub has a comparison table for each measure.
The right of reply stays open. Any response from the council will be published word for word beside the score it concerns. Corrections are welcome at editor@kentlocalnews.co.uk.
Tomorrow: Canterbury.