Part 7 · Kent LGR Investigation

This is the reader-edition companion to Kent Local News‘s Part 7 investigation, Kent’s reorganisation reaches the High Court: residents file judicial review over the missing lawful authority. The full version is written with the documents in view. This version covers the same ground in plain English.

What just happened

On Friday 7 August, a resident-led group filed a claim for judicial review at the Administrative Court in London. A judicial review is not a case about whether a decision was a good idea. It asks a narrower question: whether the people who made it had the legal power to do so, and whether they followed the right process.

The group is National Residents for Civic Accountability, a resident-led initiative. The council being challenged — the defendant — is Kent County Council. The Government department, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is what the court calls an interested party: involved, but not the body being sued.

Nothing has been decided. On the claimants’ account no judge has yet looked at it. A claim has to clear a stage called permission before it goes anywhere, and that has been neither granted nor refused. The claim was submitted electronically and, when the claimants last updated us, had not been formally issued by the court, so it does not yet have a claim number. Kent Local News has not seen the sealed claim form and reports the filing on the claimants’ account. Everything described below is what they argue — not findings, and not facts a court has accepted.

The question at the heart of it

It is the same question this series has followed since April, and it is simpler than it sounds.

Kent’s councils have been spending money, hiring staff and signing contracts to get ready for reorganisation. But the legal instrument that actually abolishes the old councils and creates the new ones — a Structural Changes Order — has still not been made. So the claimants ask: under what specific legal power was all that earlier work done?

They say nobody has ever answered it. Not fourteen councils’ own finance and legal officers, formally asked in May. Not the Government department, asked repeatedly. Not the Leader of Kent County Council, nor its chairman. Kent Local News has put the same question in its own name across six previous parts and received no substantive answer either.

What the claim argues

The claim points at one particular council decision — Kent County Council’s Decision 26/00028 — and everything done under it since. That covers hiring a “Strategic Partner” at a cost of more than £1 million, the county council acting on behalf of all fourteen Kent and Medway councils, its handling of Government money for the transition, and the reorganising of services and staffing that is already under way.

Madeleine Hunt, writing on behalf of the group, put the question to Kent Local News like this: “What legal authority did KCC have for those particular decisions and spending commitments at the time it made them, before a Structural Changes Order had brought the replacement councils into legal existence?”

What it does not mean

Some straight talking, because this is easy to over-read.

It does not mean the reorganisation has stopped. Kent County Council confirmed on 31 July that the work continues — service planning, staffing, procurement. Elections to the four new shadow councils are still set for 6 May 2027, and the new councils still take over on 1 April 2028.

It does not mean anyone has been found to have acted unlawfully. Nobody has been found to have done anything. That is what the case is for.

And it does not mean the four-council plan is a bad one. The claim is about authority and process, not about whether four councils beat fourteen.

A council preparing for a reorganisation ministers have announced is, on the face of it, an unremarkable thing for a council to do. The claimants’ point is that preparation has consequences — money committed, contracts signed — and that those consequences need a lawful basis somebody can name.

Kent is not the only place in court

Reorganisation is being challenged elsewhere too. Hampshire County Council, Essex County Council and Portsmouth City Council have issued their own judicial reviews, and Norfolk and Suffolk county councils have said they will follow.

There is a difference worth noticing, though. Those are councils taking the Government to court over decisions made about them. In Kent it is the other way round: residents are challenging their own county council, and not over which map was chosen but over whether the council had the legal power for what it was already doing.

What happens next

A judge will consider whether to grant permission for the case to proceed. If permission is refused, that is likely the end of it. If it is granted, the case goes to a hearing, and both sides put their arguments. Either way it takes months rather than weeks, and it runs alongside — not instead of — the reorganisation timetable.

The one date that does not move is 6 May 2027, when Kent votes for the new councils.

Kent Local News will report what the court decides, whichever way it goes.

Sources