Medway’s final year of emergency support may need a sequel
Plus facial recognition in Chatham, cameras you can swallow, and Rochester's strangest home gym
Medway Council hoped 2026/27 would be its final year of emergency government financial support, but a projected £70.9m budget gap means further help is already being discussed. We examine why the numbers keep getting worse, what borrowing to cover everyday spending actually costs, and what happens next. Elsewhere, Kent Police brings live facial recognition to Chatham, Medway Maritime Hospital introduces swallowable cameras, and we discover an extraordinary Rochester house with a particularly unusual collection of exercise equipment.
Medway’s final year of emergency support may need a sequel
Medway Council was hoping this would be its last year of emergency government support. With a projected £70.9m hole in next year’s finances, it is already discussing further help.
Work is continuing across council services to find savings, while the working assumption is another 4.994% council tax increase for 2027/28. Neither is likely to make the conversations with government any less necessary.
This is some distance from the message still sitting on the council’s budget webpage, which describes 2026/27 as the 'third and final' planned year of support and says Medway is on track to achieve a 'sustainable financial position.' A small website update may be in order.
The draft budget report going to Cabinet on Tuesday is rather less reassuring. It describes the financial challenge as unprecedented, warns that emergency support alone is unsustainable, and says significant changes will be required across services.
The £70.9m figure is a projected gap between spending requirements and available funding. It is not an agreed cuts package, and the final budget will not be set until February. Government funding decisions and further work on savings will change the calculations before then, but this remains a substantial problem to take into the winter.
Back in September, we examined how an £8.4m gap identified in May had become £65.9m over the summer. Adult social care accounted for much of the deterioration, as the council tried to bring its budget in line with what the service actually cost. The prospect of escaping emergency support was already receding.
It helps to understand what that support actually involves, because the name is doing quite a lot of work.
Exceptional Financial Support has allowed Medway to fund everyday spending through borrowing. It keeps services running and makes it possible to balance the budget, but the council then has to meet the resulting interest and repayment costs. Government permission to take on more debt is a rather less comforting solution than a cheque.
The independent review by public finance body CIPFA calculated that those costs associated with emergency support borrowing alone would reach about £3.8m this year. It warned that continued reliance beyond 2027/28 would make the burden increasingly difficult to sustain.
Meanwhile, the council’s wider borrowing costs are already causing trouble. The treasury report forecasts a £5.8m overspend on interest and financing in 2026/27. That is this year’s pressure, separate from next year’s funding gap, and covers more than borrowing for emergency support. Nevertheless, it is money that must be found before it can be spent on anything residents might find more useful.
The service pressures are hardly small either.
The adult social care assumptions for next year show a net additional requirement of £38.6m, even after allowing for £8.9m of savings through the Better Lives, Better Value programme. Children’s services account for another £9.2m, with school transport costs also rising.
Some of this is the expensive business of catching up with reality. Existing costs need to be properly budgeted for, alongside allowances for growing demand and provider prices. Writing down a smaller number does not make someone’s care package cheaper. It just postpones the point at which the council has to explain the overspend.
Elsewhere, the draft assumptions include higher waste contract costs and an additional £1.2m for the annual running costs of the Medway Tunnel in 2027/28. There are also proposals to generate more income, including £240,000 from a £2 monthly increase in sports centre membership fees, though these remain draft assumptions, rather than a final price list.
Council tax is the more obvious way to raise money, but it has limits.
The working assumption of a 4.994% increase applies to Medway’s share of the bill, with the final decision still to come. Each additional percentage point would generate roughly £1.5m. For scale, an extra five percentage points would bring in about £7.5m, while adding considerably to household bills and leaving most of the gap untouched.
That is arithmetic, rather than a proposal for a bigger increase. It explains why the council cannot simply send residents a larger bill and declare the problem solved.
Nor is it fair to suggest Medway has somehow forgotten to look for savings. CIPFA found it had achieved about 91% of its £28.8m savings and income target for 2025/26. Adult social care was the difficult exception, delivering around 54% of its own target. The biggest financial pressure is also the hardest place to secure the promised reductions.
The task between now and February is to produce a budget that can survive contact with the year it is supposed to fund. Further emergency support may help get it over the line, but borrowing to meet recurring costs leaves the following budget with another bill to pay.
Medway’s planned departure from emergency support is starting to resemble one of those farewell tours where extra dates keep being announced. Unfortunately, this one seems to get more expensive every year it stays on the road.
Catch up
Vern Hampton has spent decades playing in Medway bands, recording musicians in his house and, these days, repairing seemingly everybody’s guitars. Steven spoke to him about owning around 50 of the things, learning to fix them because he thought he could do a better job himself, and why his favourite restorations are instruments that look fit for firewood but still mean something to the families who own them.
Steven Keevil
There is more local music in our latest culture briefing, where Kevin Younger explains the attempt to establish free Thursday night gigs in the tiny basement of the 12 Degrees. We also meet Lux Orion ahead of their first gallery exhibition and remember Nigel Adams, the artist, poet and puppeteer whose work occasionally involved a giant papier-mâché head.
Steven Keevil
And at the rather larger end of Medway’s capacity problems, another 450 homes have been approved between Hoo and Chattenden. That takes the total across two neighbouring sites to 690, while the arguments about roads, buses, affordable housing and the railway that was supposed to accompany growth on the peninsula remain remarkably familiar. The houses, unlike the railway, are now very definitely coming.
Ed Jennings
In brief
🚔 Kent Police will be running a live facial recognition operation in Chatham tomorrow if you'd rather avoid being scanned by a dystopian database.
🚓 A man from Gillingham has been jailed for sending death threats to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.
📷 Medway Maritime Hospital has started asking patients to swallow tiny cameras to help detect bowel cancer. The capsule takes two photographs every second as it moves through the digestive system, potentially capturing more than 50,000 images over eight hours, creating an interesting slideshow for someone to sit through.
💪 Inside Medway's new 'world-class' gym.
Council matters
Meetings next week:
- Tuesday: Licensing Hearing Panel will determine the fate of the Cricketers in Gillingham following a recent licence suspension.
- Tuesday: Cabinet will discuss finances, Medway's new care home, SEND reforms, and more.
- Wednesday: Planning Committee will decide on the new care home near Rochester Airport, the upper floors of Rochester's Haus of Condiments, the next phases of East Hill, and lots more.
New planning applications:
- Change of use from disused tennis court to padel court at Bridgewood Manor Hotel.
Property of the week
Some houses are so full of character that it's difficult to know where to start, and this £850,000 four-bedroom property on Borstal Road in Rochester is very much one of them. Known as Norfolk Lodge, it spreads across four floors, with three reception rooms, three bathrooms, a conservatory, and spectacular views across the Medway. Inside, there's an appealing disregard for the idea that every room should look the same, with yellow walls, green panelling, elaborate fireplaces, a turquoise Aga and a magnificent collection of rugs. There's also an old Short Brothers sign above one fireplace, which is a rather lovely bit of local history to have lying around. Outside, the substantial garden contains what appears to be a shed dedicated to an enormous collection of wooden exercise clubs, alongside some more conventional gym equipment. We have absolutely no idea what's going on there, but we're delighted that it is. It's an eccentric, beautiful house, and considerably more interesting than another £850,000 collection of grey rooms.
Events this week
🛍️ Sun 15 Nov - Rochester Farmers' Market // Stalls selling fresh produce, good food, drinks, gifts, and more. Blue Boar Lane car park, Rochester. Free.
💬 Thu 19 Nov - No Friend to this House // Medway River Lit presents rockstar mythologist Natalie Haynes in discussion with Moira Mehaffey. Chatham Library. Free.
🖼️ 19 - 25 Nov - Can you feel me in the swells? // Solo exhibition from interdisciplinary visual artist Lux Orion. Halpern Gallery, Chatham. Free.
Footnotes
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