Age UK Kent Rivers heads for insolvency
Major local support service shuts abruptly, plus planning applications, NHS leadership change, political battles, and lots more
Age UK Kent Rivers says it is heading towards insolvency, with services at its Mackenney Centre in Gillingham closing today after staff and service users were given barely two days’ warning. We report on what has happened, what Medway Council is now trying to put in place, and what the sudden loss of a day centre means for service users and families, alongside our usual mix of planning, news in brief and more.
Age UK Kent Rivers heads for insolvency
Age UK Kent Rivers says it is heading towards insolvency, with services at its Mackenney Centre in Gillingham shutting today (Friday) after staff and service users were given barely two days’ warning.
The closure means the sudden loss of a day centre service for older people in Medway, with staff facing redundancy and families left waiting to learn what support will replace the loss.
It also leaves Medway Council trying to catch up. The council has confirmed that it commissions day care support at the Mackenney Centre through Age UK Kent Rivers and is now working to ensure that residents known to adult social care are not left without provision.
In a statement, the charity’s trustees said Age UK Kent Rivers had been facing “significant cash flow challenges” and that, despite efforts in recent months to address worsening financial problems, the position had become unsustainable. They said the charity’s immediate priority was to support clients, staff, volunteers, and partners through the transition.
The charity has now confirmed that it is likely to enter an insolvency process as a response to mounting financial pressures. That puts formal wording around what had already become clear around the Mackenney Centre this week. Staff were told on Wednesday that the service would close today. Redundancies are expected to follow. Reports elsewhere suggest around a dozen jobs at the centre are affected.
That is abrupt by any standard. Staff are having to absorb the loss of their jobs while still working through the final hours of a service many of them will have spent years helping to run. Service users, many of whom will have built routines, trust and friendships around the centre, have effectively been told that the support they expected to still be there next week will be gone before the weekend is out.
This is important because day centres are not interchangeable bits of provision that can simply be swapped out on paper. For the people who use them, they are often part of the shape of daily life. They provide company, routine, familiar staff and a known setting. For families and carers, respite care can provide a degree of confidence that someone is being looked after in a place they know. When that disappears suddenly, the effect is immediate.
The Mackenney Centre is not some obscure satellite site. It has long been Age UK Kent Rivers’ best-known base in Medway, long associated with support for older residents. The loss of a place like that carries weight in itself. But the public interest case here does not rest solely on its history or local profile. It rests on the fact that this was part of the wider care picture in Medway, not a standalone service operating entirely outside it.
Across Medway, Dartford, Gravesham, Swanley, Faversham, and Sittingbourne, Age UK Kent Rivers ran a wide mix of services for older people and adults with learning disabilities, including day centres, meal deliveries, home care, befriending, information and advice, carers’ relief and wellbeing activities. In Medway, its day services have been described as including personal care, hairdressing, laundry, meals, trips and social activities, which gives a sense of how much everyday support could be wrapped up in the loss of one centre.
Medway Council says it is working with Age UK Kent Rivers to ensure residents known to its adult social care team continue to receive the support they rely on. It has also requested a full list of service users from the charity to understand the scale of the impact.
A Medway Council spokesperson said: “We are working with Age UK Kent Rivers to ensure residents who are known to our Adult Social Care team continue to receive the support they rely on. Our social care team will work closely with the residents, their families and carers to ensure appropriate care packages are put in place as soon as possible.”
If the council is still having to obtain and cross-check the full list of service users to understand the impact, then this was plainly not a slow, carefully managed transition with alternatives arranged long in advance. The provider has reached the point where it cannot continue in its current form, and the state is now moving behind it.
There is also a wider financial backdrop that makes the present crisis look less like a freak event and more like the point at which longer-running pressure finally became impossible to contain. Age UK Kent Rivers’ latest filed accounts were submitted 151 days late. They showed a deficit of £761,162 for the year to 31 March 2024, while reserves fell sharply over the same period. This year’s accounts are also overdue.
Those figures do not explain every decision taken this week. They do not tell you exactly when the charity concluded that its position had become unsustainable. And they do not, by themselves, map out the route from financial strain to service closure. But they do show an organisation already under plain pressure before the Mackenney Centre was suddenly pulled.
That matters because institutional failure rarely arrives all at once. It builds as accounts are delayed, deficits widen, and reserves shrink. Risks that can be managed for a while stop being manageable. Eventually, the pressure spills out of the financial pages and into the services people rely on. What is happening now in Gillingham looks very much like that point.
Once it reaches that stage, the consequences are no longer abstract. They land in the lives of people who may never have read a set of charity accounts and have no reason to care about insolvency language beyond what it means for whether a minibus turns up, whether a day centre opens, or whether a parent or relative still has somewhere familiar to go next week.
For Age UK Kent Rivers, this is a financial crisis. For the council, it is now a care continuity problem. For the staff, it is a redundancy story. For service users and their families, it is the sudden disappearance of something much more immediate than a line in a trustee statement.
Council matters
Meetings next week:
- The only meeting scheduled for next week has been cancelled, so it's all quiet at Gun Wharf.
New planning applications:
- Plans to convert the former St John Fisher School on Maidstone Road building into 11 flats, and build a new block of 12 flats at the rear.
- Moto at Farthing Corner Services intends to build a new substation to facilitate electric vehicle charging.
- Three HMOs are proposed this week, on Balmoral Road and Shakespeare Road in Gillingham and Star Hill in Rochester.
In brief
📍 While we wait to hear how Kent might look following local government reorganisation, what can decisions about other areas tell us about our future? We've been investigating over on our sister title, the Kent Current.
Ed Jennings
🥬 Residents in St Mary Hoo are bemused by the new green telegraph poles installed in their village. The KentOnline report features some superb photos of parish council chair Nick Craddy posing with vegetables.
🏥 Siobhan Callanan will become Interim Chief Executive of Medway NHS Foundation Trust following the sudden departure of Jonathan Wade.
🗣️ KentOnline have been asking residents of Twydall how they'd like £20m Pride in Place funding spent in their area, with inevitable results.
🐟 A fishmonger who really likes AI imagery is opening on Rochester High Street.
🎙️ The latest Kent Politics Podcast features a punchy debate between Labour councillor Alex Paterson and Conservative councillor Andrew Lawrence on School Streets, finances, and more.
👁️🗨️ All may not be well in Medway's cross-party Stand Up to Racism WhatsApp group, where we've been hearing reports of abuse and, er, racism between members. If anyone with any knowledge would like to chat to us off the record, our contact details are below.
Property of the week
This six-bedroom detached farmhouse on the edge of Allhallows is on the market for £850,000 to £925,000 and is operating at a scale that most Medway houses simply do not attempt. It has six double bedrooms, three bathrooms upstairs, a boot-room cloakroom downstairs, a double garage, stables and an outbuilding, all sitting on a sizeable plot behind electric gates. But the detail that really tells you what sort of home this is comes early. Two staircases. Two! It is built for space, separation, and the ability to live alongside others without constantly being in each other’s way. Add in beams, a log burner and solar panels, and it is the full farmhouse package. Grand, private, and very much for someone who wants their next home to feel like a statement rather than a compromise.
Events this week
📷 28 Mar - 31 Aug - Ocean Photographer of the Year // Exhibition of 116 award-winning photographs. Chatham Historic Dockyard. Tickets £29 (includes dockyard entry).
🎻 Sun 29 Mar - City of Rochester Symphony Orchestra: Music from the Stage // Longstanding orchestra perform theatre classics. Glassbox Theatre, Gillingham. Tickets £20.
Footnotes
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