Name the lawful authority: fourteen Kent councils asked to justify LGR spending

Part 4 of 5 · Kent LGR Investigation

This is the reader-edition companion to Kent Local News‘s Part 4 investigation, Kent’s statutory officers put on notice over pre-Royal-Assent reorganisation spending, published Friday 22 May. The full account ran to around 3,000 words and was written for council officers, lawyers and accountability bodies. This version covers the same ground, in plain English, for anyone who lives in Kent and pays for it.

What the notice is

A “candour notice” is a formal written warning. It tells the people receiving it that, if they go on doing what they have been doing, they do so in the documented knowledge of what the notice records — they cannot later say they did not know.

The notice at the centre of Part 4 was issued on 4 May 2026 by National Residents for Civic Accountability (NRCA), and signed by Sean Turner — a Kent resident, a Heritage Party councillor and the party’s Kent coordinator. It went to every Section 151 Officer and Monitoring Officer in Kent and Medway. These are the senior council staff whose personal legal duty it is to stop their council spending money it does not have lawful authority to spend, and to report it if they do.

The notice was also copied to the external auditor, Grant Thornton; to the National Audit Office; and to the Public Accounts Committee.

It set a fourteen-day window for a reply. That window closed on 18 May.

The single question

At the centre of the notice is one question.

The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill received Royal Assent — became law — on 29 April 2026. Until that date, the law to compel councils into the Government’s preferred unitary structures did not exist.

Kent councils, including KCC, were spending public money on local government reorganisation before that date. The notice asks: which specific Act of Parliament, which specific section, gave them lawful authority to do so?

That question has now been put — in writing, with a deadline — to the senior officers of all fourteen Kent and Medway councils, to the Cabinet of Kent County Council, and to every one of KCC’s eighty-one elected councillors.

What we asked, and who answered

Before publishing Edition A on 22 May, Kent Local News wrote separately to the press or communications office of every one of the fourteen councils with a right-of-reply letter, inviting each one to address the central question.

By the deadline, none of the fourteen had provided a substantive answer.

Dover District Council and Sevenoaks District Council each sent an automated acknowledgement that their press office had received the enquiry. Neither addressed the question.

Kent County Council, Medway Council, Ashford Borough Council, Canterbury City Council, Dartford Borough Council, Folkestone & Hythe District Council, Gravesham Borough Council, Maidstone Borough Council, Swale Borough Council and Thanet District Council did not reply at all. The same was true of every member of the KCC Cabinet, of the KCC Leader’s office, and of the Leader, Linden Kemkaran, personally.

In the two days since Edition A published, that position has not changed. Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council and Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, whose right-of-reply window ran later, have not replied either.

The silence is itself the story.

The one decision that made it urgent

What made the notice immediate, rather than a paper exercise, was a single decision taken six days after KCC Cabinet members had been served with it.

On 14 May 2026, the KCC Cabinet Committee considered Decision 26/00028 — the procurement of what is called a “Strategic Partner” to deliver Kent’s reorganisation work. KCC’s own papers describe the contract’s value as not yet confirmed but anticipated to exceed £1 million. They state that KCC will act as the lead council for all fourteen Kent and Medway authorities.

The decision was taken before any Structural Changes Order — the legal instrument that would actually create new councils — has been made; and before the Government’s own ministerial decision on Kent, currently expected in July. The Cabinet papers state that the decision is “only related to procurement” and therefore has “no legal implications”.

The notice’s position is that the question of lawful authority applies to exactly that kind of conduct.

Different rosette, same machinery

One political dimension runs through the Kent reorganisation story.

In May 2025, Reform UK won 57 of the 81 seats on Kent County Council on an anti-establishment platform. Reform’s national manifesto was silent on local government reorganisation. Within months of taking office, Kent’s Reform UK administration submitted a proposal for a single unitary authority covering all of Kent and Medway — the largest such structure available. By May 2026 it had taken the £1m+ strategic-partner procurement decision through Cabinet, before the law to create that structure had been passed.

In October 2025 The Guardian published a leaked recording of a Reform UK Kent group meeting in which, the newspaper reported, the Leader Linden Kemkaran responded to internal dissent with the words “you’re just going to have to fucking suck it up”. Kent Local News cites that material to The Guardian and has not independently verified the recording.

In February 2026 seven KCC councillors left Reform UK for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain — six of them having been expelled — reducing the Reform majority.

KCC’s Reform UK administration and the office of its Leader were asked, in Edition A’s right-of-reply letter, how an anti-establishment platform is reconciled with submitting Kent and Medway’s largest-ever unitary proposal and a strategic-partner contract anticipated to exceed £1 million before any Structural Changes Order has been made. They did not reply.

The numbers underneath

The notice does not stand alone. It sits on top of a financial picture set out in a separate submission to the National Audit Office, dated 24 February 2026.

That submission identified more than £410 million of immediate financial risk in KCC’s 2026-27 budget; KCC long-term debt of around £730 million; an Adult Social Care overspend of £46.4 million in 2024-25; a £19.2 million KCC contract for basement strengthening at Sessions House; and £99.4 million of one-off reorganisation transition costs in the Strategic Business Case for the new Kent unitary.

A separate Kent County Council programme — the move of its core finance, HR, payroll and procurement systems to Oracle Cloud — is now flagged in KCC’s own published budget as “Very Likely” to overrun, with a forecast £4.9 million overspend and a documented practice of holding some additional costs in an IT reserve rather than the main financial plan. The same budget records a separate £30 million estimated annual exposure for local-government reorganisation pre-implementation costs, with no budget provision against it.

A national point sits behind all of this: the Government acknowledged in February 2026 that the business-rate baseline used to set every English council’s budget contained a £113 million error. No Kent or Medway council has yet published revalidated business-case figures against that correction.

While Kent stays silent, the ministerial paper trail builds

Two ministerial letters reached resident campaigners in the days before publication that bear directly on the question Kent councils have not answered.

A letter from the Minister, Alison McGovern, dated 18 May 2026 cites three Government sources for the reorganisation programme — the Surrey Structural Changes Order 2026, the Government’s LGR policy collection, and the Explanatory Memorandum to the 2025 election-postponement order. Each identifies the Structural Changes Order as the legal mechanism by which reorganisation takes effect. The Surrey Order was made after Royal Assent on 29 April 2026; none of the three documents identifies a statutory provision authorising pre-Royal-Assent expenditure.

A second letter dated 19 May 2026 — the same day NRCA served the Pre-Action Protocol — from Alex Badrick, Deputy Principal Private Secretary, contains three admissions. That “following legal advice, the Government withdrew its original decision to postpone 30 local elections in May”. That “it was for councils to decide whether to submit a proposal in response to the invitation” — the third separate ministerial source confirming voluntary participation. And that reorganisation “is a statutory process under part 1 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007” — the same SCO mechanism that did not exist before Royal Assent.

What the councils have been silent on, multiple Government ministerial sources have now confirmed in writing.

What happens next

The candour notice opens four routes that are now running.

The first is a Section 114 notice. If any one of the fourteen Section 151 Officers issued one, the reorganisation procurement programme in that council would stop.

The second is judicial review. On 19 May 2026, NRCA served a Final Letter Before Claim — the last formal step before going to court — on the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed. The letter is brought by residents and serving councillors from across England, sets out eleven grounds of challenge beginning with the missing lawful authority for pre-Royal-Assent spending, and requires a substantive Government response by 2 June 2026.

The third is the Structural Changes Order itself. When the Government makes it, the notice’s argument is that the statutory officers who implement it will be doing so in the documented knowledge of the record the notice sets out.

The fourth is the external auditor. Grant Thornton, in the person of Sarah Ironmonger, is on copy of the notice and is the formal route through which a value-for-money objection would be pursued.

What this means for Kent residents

For Kent residents the practical effect is that the system designed to spend their money lawfully — Section 151 Officers, Monitoring Officers, external auditors — has been asked, in writing, to confirm that it has done so. Two days after the question was put publicly, none of the fourteen Kent and Medway councils has done that.

For council taxpayers, that matters because the bills underneath the reorganisation programme are theirs. The £1 million-plus strategic-partner contract is a Kent contract. The £30 million pre-implementation exposure sits on KCC’s own budget. Any element of either that is later found to have been incurred without lawful authority becomes a question about who is personally answerable for it.

For voters, it matters because the councillors elected in May 2025 — including a Reform UK administration that ran on an anti-establishment platform — are the people now signing off the procurement that the notice questions. Part 5 of this investigation will set out where each party stands on the lawful-authority question, and what the implications are for residents at the next ballot.

For everyone in Kent, the question is the same question the notice puts to the officers: name the lawful authority. So far, nobody has.

Sources

• Kent Local News — Kent LGR Investigation Part 4, Edition A (post 21966, published 22 May 2026): Kent’s statutory officers put on notice over pre-Royal-Assent reorganisation spending.
• National Residents for Civic Accountability, Formal Notice — Candour and Personal Statutory Liability, 4 May 2026 (23-page text on file).
• Kent County Council Devolution & LGR Cabinet Committee, Decision 26/00028 — Procurement of a Strategic Partner, Report + Record of Decision, 14 May 2026 (on file).
• NRCA submission to the National Audit Office, Kent County Council Financial Position, 24 February 2026.
• Kent County Council Budget Risks Register, Appendix K accompanying the 2026-27 budget (Oracle Cloud programme entry; LGR pre-implementation entry).
• National Residents for Civic Accountability, Final Letter Before Claim, reference NRCA/PAP/SCO/2026/001, 19 May 2026.
• The Guardian — Reform UK Kent leaked recording reports, October 2025.
• Kent Local News — Kent LGR Investigation Parts 1, 2 and 3.
• Alison McGovern MP (Minister for Local Government), letter MC2026/11401, 18 May 2026 (received via Joy Morrissey MP).
• Alex Badrick (Deputy Principal Private Secretary, MHCLG), letter to Max Wilkinson MP, 19 May 2026.