Kent County Council scores in band B for transparency and children’s services, but in band D for freedom of information, finances and roads, 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.
Kent County Council, which runs schools, social care, roads and other county services for about 1.6 million people, is scored on nine measures in the October refresh of the Kent Council Scorecard. It scores in band B on three, band C on two and band D on four. This is the first of 14 pieces, one for each Kent council, published each weekday until 20 November.
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 Kent County Council page.
The scores at a glance
| Measure | Score | Band | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Complaints handling | 60 | C | 5th of 14 |
| Freedom of information | 40 | D | 12th of 13 scored |
| Financial health | 48 | D | 11th of 14 |
| Transparency | 81 | B | joint 2nd of 14 |
| Education and children’s services | 75 | B | 1st of 2 |
| Safeguarding | 75 | B | 1st of 2 |
| Highways | 54 | D | 2nd of 2 |
| Adult social care | 61 | C | 1st of 2 |
| Manifesto delivery (Trust) | 52 | D | 8th of 14 |
Refuse collection, planning and housing are run by the district councils, so they do not apply to the county. Education, safeguarding, highways and adult social care apply only to Kent County Council and Medway, so the position on those is out of two.
Where it does best
On transparency, the county council scores 81, joint second in Kent with Ashford. It publishes monthly spending data, councillors’ allowances and interests, senior salaries and a searchable log of information released under freedom of information, and its contracts register on the Kent Business Portal listed 611 contracts when checked on 1 October.
On children’s services, Ofsted rated the council Good overall after an inspection in November 2025, published in February 2026, with its services for children in care rated Outstanding. That is down from the Outstanding rating it held from May 2022.
On adult social care it scores 61, ahead of Medway. More of the people it supports live at home or with family than the England average: 82.9% of those aged 18 to 64 and 66.9% of those aged 65 and over, against 77.4% and 60.3%. The council publishes waiting times for care needs assessments every quarter.
Where it falls short
On freedom of information, the council answered 82.1% of requests within the legal limit of 20 working days in 2025-26 (2,463 of 2,999), the highest volume in Kent. That is up from 72.2% two years earlier, but below the 90% the Information Commissioner expects. The Commissioner issued 25 decision notices against the council in the three years to 1 October, by far the most in Kent, nine of them finding it had failed to respond in time. The council told Kent Local News in September that 88% of requests closed in 2026 so far had been answered in time.
On finances, it scores 48. The council overspent its 2025-26 revenue budget by £22.7m, with adult social care and health £42.9m over, and schools’ budgets overspent by a further £33.0m. Its general fund reserve fell to 4.3% of the net budget, below its own 5% floor, and it carries a £130.5m schools deficit under a statutory override to March 2028. Its external auditor, Grant Thornton, rates its financial sustainability as a significant weakness.
On highways, it scores 54. In the Department for Transport’s figures for the year to March 2026, 7% of Kent’s A roads and 7% of its B and C roads needed maintenance considering, against 4% and 6% for England. The council repaired 91% of reported potholes within its 28-day standard in 2025-26, against a 90% target, down from 96% the year before, and its 2026 report puts the maintenance backlog at over £1bn.
In adult social care, the Care Quality Commission rated the council as requiring improvement in May 2025, and only 31.0% of carers said they were satisfied with support, against 36.7% for England.
Promises
The Trust score of 52 combines KLN’s tracking of the Reform UK administration’s election pledges with whether its actions match the issues residents raise. Of 14 pledges tracked, three are kept, including the 5% cut in councillors’ allowances, one is partly kept, one is outside the council’s control and eight are still pending. One is judged broken: the pledge to push back on Government-imposed unitary structures, after the administration submitted its own unitary model for Kent.
Who was in charge
Reform UK has run the county council since 22 May 2025, after 28 years of Conservative control. Much of the data covers years that straddle the change. Each score on the council’s page names the administration in office during the period it measures: the 2025-26 budget, for example, was set by the Conservative administration in February 2025 and largely delivered by Reform UK, and road condition reflects maintenance over many years.
What the council said
The council responded to the first refresh in July. It agreed with its complaints, education and safeguarding scores. It said the attribution of its freedom of information performance to the political administration was “incorrect”, because the function “operates independently”. It said a fair council tax comparison should include the separate fire precept that some counties’ residents pay; on that basis Kent’s charge is the median of the 21 shire counties, which leaves the score unchanged. It also said there was no legal requirement to run a dedicated open-data portal. Its responses are published in full on its Scorecard page.
The council was sent its October scores on 2 October and a further notice about its highways score on 17 October. It did not respond to either.
What it means for Kent
The county council’s services reach every household in Kent outside Medway, whichever district council collects the bins. The other 13 councils follow in this series, starting with Medway tomorrow. 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.