Kent and Medway's relationship seems increasingly strained
How a plan to save Kent’s tourism voice became another casualty of Reform’s chaos. Plus anti-immigration march is off, news in brief, and more
Moments of unity between Kent and Medway never used to be rare. Still, the latest attempt under Kent’s new Reform administration has led to a plan for a joint ‘Brand Kent’ going back to the drawing board amid last-minute changes, accusations of bad faith, and growing mistrust between Gun Wharf and County Hall. Further down, we have news of the collapse of a planned anti-immigration protest in Medway this weekend, news in brief, and more.
Kent and Medway’s relationship seems increasingly strained
For a brief moment, it looked like Kent’s councils might actually pull something off together. After the collapse of Visit Kent and Locate in Kent, the county’s long-time flag-bearers for tourism and investment, a plan emerged for a joint rescue under a new banner: Brand Kent.
Kent County Council and Medway Council would pool £500,000 to keep the work alive, taking the organisations’ work in-house and saving jobs, databases and websites from liquidation. A rare joint statement spoke about shared ambitions, mutual pride and working “as quickly as possible to restore a Brand Kent service.”
But the partnership was already coming apart by the time Medway’s cabinet met to approve its contribution. Late on the Friday before the meeting, Kent County Council’s Reform administration changed the deal. The ask jumped from £50,000 to £100,000, delivered by email with no warning.
Medway’s leadership, blindsided, reacted furiously. At the meeting, deputy leader Teresa Murray called it “silly politics.” She accused KCC of “scrambling around for any type of money to pretend DOGE has been a success”, referencing the Reform-branded “department of government efficiency.”
Economic regeneration lead Harinder Mahil said whoever was making the decisions at County Hall needed to “get a grip.” “You don’t just double the ask of a partner after the papers have been published,” he said, adding, “behaving like this isn’t in the best interests of Medway residents or Kent residents.”
Council leader Vince Maple described the move as “absolutely chaotic” and evidence that Reform “don’t understand how local government works.” He said, “Coming to us after our papers have been published to ask us to increase our contribution by 100% was never going to happen.”
The £50,000 payment was pulled from the agenda. What had started as an attempt to show stability after the sudden collapse of Kent’s two biggest promotional bodies had become another example of dysfunction between the two authorities.
Visit Kent’s closure in September was more than losing a tourism website. For over 20 years, it had been the coordination machine behind how the county sold itself, corralling castles, breweries, festivals and museums into a single pitch to the outside world. Its parent organisation, Go To Places, also ran Visit Herts. When it folded, both disappeared overnight.
Locate in Kent, which had promoted business investment since 1997, followed a few weeks later. Between them, the two organisations had supported thousands of jobs and drawn billions into the local economy.
KCC cabinet member Paul King, who leads economic development under Reform, called the closures “a massive blow” and promised Brand Kent would rebuild the county’s voice. “The importance of these services in encouraging and supporting local businesses, attracting visitor spend and investment to Kent and Medway… cannot be underestimated,” he said.
That was before politics got in the way.
The breakdown over Brand Kent is part of a broader collapse in relations between KCC and the rest of Kent’s local government family, especially with Medway.
Tensions were already high after a Guardian video showed KCC leader Linden Kemkaran swearing at her own councillors and accusing other council leaders of “a strong level of ignorance” and misogyny during discussions over local government reorganisation.
Kemkaran later argued that her comments were taken from a private meeting and that she had spoken frankly to her political group, not the wider county. But her words landed badly. Maple wrote demanding an apology, calling the suggestion that he had acted in a misogynistic way “ludicrous.”
In a letter to all Kent leaders, seen by Local Authority, Kemkaran defended herself and repeated many of the same points. She insisted the leaked footage “was not a constituted KCC meeting” and said the comments had been made in the context of a private Reform Group discussion.
“I do feel there is a shocking level of ignorance from many Kent leaders about the scale of the costs that are likely to incur to the council taxpayer from disaggregation of county-level services into smaller unitary councils,” she wrote. The letter said her administration would continue to pursue a business case for a single Kent and Medway unitary, a plan she described as a “spoke in the wheel” to the government’s reorganisation agenda.
If the intention was to calm things down, it did not work. One leader described the letter as “quite obnoxious”. Another said she should “take care of her own shambolic administration before criticising others”.
Conservative Tonbridge and Malling leader Matt Boughton told KentOnline it “wasn’t exactly an example of how to win friends and influence people”, adding that he had “significant political differences with a lot of the other leaders in Kent, but it doesn’t affect my ability to collaborate with them”.
Green leader of Maidstone, Stuart Jeffery, said he was “taken aback” by the tone. “Linden’s letter was quite obnoxious. I notice that she doubled down on the claim that the other council leaders are ‘shockingly ignorant’ on LGR,” he said.
Reform’s internal troubles have done little to reassure anyone watching. Since the video leaked, five Kent councillors have been expelled from the party. The administration that promised to “cut waste and bring discipline” has spent most of October mired in its own discipline problems.
When Brand Kent was first announced, both sides described it as a way to protect the region’s reputation and maintain investment confidence. “Tourism and inward investment are critical to the economy of Kent and Medway,” Mahil said at the time, noting that tourism alone contributes around £4 billion a year and supports nearly 78,000 jobs.
That optimism has now faded. What was meant to showcase cooperation has become a symbol of political breakdown, a casualty of the same mistrust that now colours nearly every exchange between Gun Wharf and County Hall.
Medway still hopes the plan can be salvaged, but words from councillors suggest that may not be easy. “We were supposed to be partners in this,” Murray told colleagues during Cabinet. “If there were problems, we would always make the time to work through them. But this is a confused race to the bottom.”
At County Hall, King maintains that discussions remain “amicable and constructive” and that Brand Kent is still “a dynamic process”. But for now, there is no timetable, agreement, or shared public message.
KCC insists the new Brand Kent service will advance, with a report due to its cabinet committee next month. Medway has paused its own decision until after new talks. In the meantime, the service hangs in limbo.
For years, tourism boards like Visit Kent quietly held together the marketing side of the county’s economy, connecting small attractions, amplifying events and keeping Kent visible to the outside world. Their disappearance has made that coordination problem obvious.
For now, Kent’s councils can’t agree on who pays to keep the lights on. The people who built the county’s reputation have gone, the sites have stopped updating, and a plan meant to show unity has ended up showing the opposite.
March off
After a rather pitiful turnout for UKIP’s march through Rochester a couple of weekends ago, a second anti-immigration march organised for this weekend has seemingly fallen apart.
This protest was expected to be a rather larger event, as it was organised by Medway’s group of flag erecters and supported by Harry Hilden, the man behind several marches across the county in recent weeks.
The organisation for this march hadn’t seemed exceptionally well organised, though. Posters advertised three different locations, from Gillingham to Anchorage House to Gun Wharf. They seemed to have settled on the latter, but it appears to all be off now after Hilden announced in a Facebook post that it was cancelled due to ‘personal issues with the organisers.’
It is unclear exactly what those issues might be, though it is notable that most of the flagging group have been remarkably quiet on the subject on social media in the last few weeks. Regardless, the march appears to be off, leaving Medway off the immediate calendar for upcoming events.
In the meantime, protests continue across Kent, with Herne Bay, Gravesend, Dartford, and Folkestone all seeing events in the coming weeks, so it seems inevitable that something will circulate back to Medway eventually. Who will be behind it the next time, and whether or not they can successfully organise something that sees a turnout in double figures, remains to be seen.
In brief
🚒 A Medway City Estate recycling site went up in flames on Friday night, leading to parts of Strood, Rochester, and Chatham smelling like burnt plastic. It comes just three months after a similar fire.
🏫 Rivermead at Stoke, a new SEND school on the Hoo Peninsula, has officially opened, providing an extra 100 places for children with autism and complex needs.
🏪 Poundland at Hempstead Valley will close on 31 December. It follows the closure of the Rainham branch in August.
More Authority
For our weekend interview, we sat down with Labour councillor for Strood South, Mark Jones, who has been a councillor in Medway on and off since 1991. Steven met him to talk about his time on various councils, the Rochester Film Society, and his issues with people who don’t use public transport properly.
Footnotes
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