Introduction
What is a Corporate Plan
A Corporate Plan sets the direction for the council and how it should work to shape the future of the district for its residents and businesses.
Most of the services the council delivers must be provided by law. These include waste collection, determining planning applications, distributing housing benefit and helping people find housing.
Council staff and councillors also work to bring about long-term improvements for our district, including where we should focus our resources and what projects we should deliver.
A pdf version of the Coporate Plan 2025 (PDF, 862KB) is available to view or download.
Corporate Plan 2025 - 2030
Our district, our world - enhancing prosperity and well-being for all
The plan, adopted by full council on Wednesday 25 June 2025, sets out a blueprint for our towns, villages and communities for the next five years. We will work with our communities, schools, businesses and partners to deliver a better future for our residents, grow our economy and provide a better experience for our visitors.
The aspiration is to improve the services we are required to deliver and make them more efficient and easier to access. We will also be working with our communities to improve people's well-being and the health of the environment. This plan has sustainability at its heart. We all acknowledge that we must live within out means.
The well-being of our communities, the strength of the local economy and enhancing the environment are central to our ambitions and the needs of all our residents. The plan shows how we will reflect this in our work.
Our residents and communities are central to our ambitions, and we will support them through delivering new affordable and sustainable homes. Alongside this we will deliver Otterpool Park, our highly ambitious new garden town.
We also recognise the important role we have working in partnership to improve services - including transport, water quality and roads - and through this plan we will strengthen our approach to this, advocating strongly on your behalf for the benefit of our district.
Five themes guiding Corporate Plan
The plan is based on five themes – leadership, economy, home, community and nature.
Focussing our resources on these themes aims to ensure that the district remains a great place to live, as we continue to improve our services.
Resources will be focussed on the services we deliver directly. It is hoped that a positive impact will be made on the wider world too.
Sustainable Development Goals
To underpin our plans for the future of the district, we are using the United Nations 17 Sustainability Goals as a key guiding framework. These goals, shown by the square symbols in the consultation, have been agreed by countries and organisations around the world. They cover a wide range of topics including people’s health, equality, wellbeing, economic growth, good governance and environmental issues.
Making it happen
This plan sets out the high-level ambitions and key commitments that will guide our services and investment over the next five years.
To support this plan we are producing an action plan, setting out specific measurable actions to be delivered against a time frame. Progress on this plan will be reported every six months and the plan will be kept under review.
Our aim is to work successfully with partners at every opportunity. This could be at national level or more locally with organisations such as town and parish councils, Creative Folkestone, Folkestone College and the Romney Marsh Partnership.
Public engagement
In developing this plan, we wanted to have a genuinely open consultation that would enable residents, businesses, young people and partners to influence the council’s work.
We used a variety of ways to consult, including focus groups, door-to-door research, events with schools and young people, interviews with business owners and online and paper-based surveys.
The consultation resulted in rich feedback from a wide variety of people and groups that has informed our final plan.
There was general support for the themes and guiding principles we consulted on, but many comments related to services that we don’t deliver, such as public transport, roads, motorways, healthcare and water quality.
It’s clear from people’s comments that we need to work closely with other organisations to improve the quality of all services. In this plan we’re looking to strengthen our community leadership role to achieve better results for our residents and businesses, using our voice to lobby other organisations where we need to.
Page updated: 25 June 2025