Until 2012 there wasn’t a single Green Party member on any council in Kent, but the previously obscure group is now involved in running two of the county's authorities.

Here, one year after Folkestone and Hythe became Kent’s first-ever Green-led council, KentOnline looks at what small parties actually do when in power…

From their stronghold on Hythe Town Council, Folkestone and Hythe’s Greens took the district council in May last year.

With 11 of the 30 seats, they teamed up with the Liberal Democrats to form a minority administration, turfing out the Conservatives, whose leader David Monk lost his seat.

“I didn’t really fully anticipate the height of the mountain that there was to climb, and the size of the challenge that was before us,” says council leader Cllr Jim Martin (Green).

“On day one, Susan Priest, our chief executive, took me into my office, sat me down and said ‘first thing is we’ve got a four-and-a-half million pound black hole.’”

He was told that if the new administration did not do anything fast, the authority would be bankrupt within their four-year term.

“We agreed right at the start that all customer-facing services would be ringfenced, so no cuts in rubbish collection, street cleaning, and we looked to take it all out of administration and things that the customers wouldn’t see. And we managed it,” he explained.

As part of a cost-cutting programme, 16 members of staff, many of them senior officers and managers at the council, took voluntary redundancies.

“It’s always sad to see colleagues go,” Cllr Martin said.

“But the savings we made because they were high salary earners, that allowed us a bit of room so we could promote people, bring in more trainees and that sort of thing.”

The council made a balanced budget this year without dipping into reserves, and is looking at the same next year.

Deputy leader and cabinet member for finance Cllr Tim Prater (Lib Dem) says balancing the budget was “six of the hardest months work across the council that I have seen”.

“It was effectively forecasting that unless something was done the council would go bankrupt, and dealing with that was absolutely one of our top priorities for the year,” he said.

However, it wasn’t council finance issues which enthused the district’s Greens in their conquest of the council.

In 2019, a strip of land on Princes Parade in Hythe formerly used as a waste dumping site was earmarked for development into 150 homes and a leisure centre.

The project was blighted for years by spiralling costs and delays, and in the 2023 council election, the Greens, Lib Dems and Labour all promised to do away with it.

Cllr Martin was formerly the chairman of Save Princes Parade, the campaign against the development.

The Greens committed to axing the development as soon as they took office, and earlier this year, unsightly white hoardings around the site were removed and replaced with wooden fencing.

Cllr Martin stresses that if they had carried on with the project it would have “bankrupted the council”.

The site used to be a municipal waste dump so was contaminated - adding additional costs on top of routine building costs, which spiralled out of control for the project.

“The development of Princes Parade was unsustainable on many levels: loss of flora and fauna, loss of trees, loss of habitat for animals, flooding, etc,” Cllr Martin said.

In June 2019, the full council of FHDC voted to scrap the whole project, but the cabinet chose not to do so.

“The site would have provided a leisure centre with an asset value of £20m but it would have cost the council £50m to develop it,” Cllr Martin continued.

The district also hosts one of the largest planned developments in the country - the Otterpool Park ‘garden town’.

The first 8,500 homes of a planned 10,000 on and around the former Folkestone Racecourse were approved by FHDC’s planning committee last April, while the Tories were still in charge.

However, Cllr Martin was on the planning committee when that decision was made, and voted against it.

“I voted against Otterpool not because I didn’t want it, but because it wasn’t green enough,” he explained.

“This is a garden town for the 21st century, the way it was planned was just like a big housing estate - it was like something we would do in the 1970s, but maybe I’m being too cruel there.”

Before the full planning application, the development faced stiff opposition, much of which was on environmental grounds.

However, Cllr Martin is pragmatic with his position on the planned new town, which is set for land close to Junction 11 of the M20 and next to Westenhanger station.

“People need places to live - the overriding pressure that we’ve got in terms of our whole society at the moment is people don’t have enough places to live,” he said.

“On every indicator that you look at from homelessness through private rented evictions, overcrowding – we need more housing.

“People will generally agree with that, but then they say ‘yeah but not here, here isn’t the right place, put it over there, away from where I’m living,’ but we’ve got to have places to live.

“If you’re going to create places to live then doing it on top of a motorway junction and next to a railway station is a pretty good place to put some new dwellings.”

In April last year, Otterpool Park LLP, a company set up by FHDC, asked for an additional £80m from the authority, which would bring the total borrowing for the project up to £199m.

Cllr Martin says that due to high interest rates “an £80m loan just couldn’t happen”, so the council contacted Homes England - a central government organisation which helps local authorities fund affordable housing.

“We had to rebuild our relationship with Homes England, and I have sweated blood over that,” he said.

“But the good news is Homes England are back on board, we’re working in partnership again and we’re in their business plan for next year.

“What that means is they will give us some money – how much that means we’re not sure, we’re still negotiating but that means we’ll be able to do the wastewater treatment plant at Otterpool.”

He also described his personal “proudest achievement” in administration as successfully lobbying to have all new homes at Otterpool Park include their own solar panels where possible.

But the Green administration has a complicated relationship with green power - in March the council’s planning committee rejected a huge rural solar farm in Postling amid fears it would harm the landscape.

However, the planning committee did not have a Green majority on it, and planning decisions are meant to be non-political.

“It is a balancing act, and it is very finely balanced, we need all the carbon-free energy we can get, but each site or proposal for generation of energy needs to be carefully considered and its impact on the environment,” Cllr Martin said.

“There is no simple answer, we just have to deal with each proposal on its individual merits.”

Back when the Greens and Lib Dems took over, Labour were invited to join the coalition, but the party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) blocked them from doing so.

Then-Labour group leader Cllr Connor McConville (Lab) explained: “Personally I would prefer to be making decisions within the coalition, however not all of the Labour group share that view, which is why the NEC has not been approached again to reconsider their decision.

“However we will continue to work constructively with the administration through the council's various committees.”

The Green leadership did, however, give the chairmanship of every specific council committee to Labour members.

“I was really disappointed that Labour couldn’t take places in the cabinet,” said Cllr Prater.

“They are involved in the administration and they are part of the people running the council, they’re just doing it from a different set of chairs.”

Labour have been “hugely participative and supportive,” Cllr Martin added.

Elsewhere in Kent, the Greens are on the rise as well.

As well as taking Folkestone in May last year, they also joined the administration on Ashford Borough Council.

Ashford was a Tory stronghold of more than 20 years, but now is run by a coalition, with the Greens the junior partner of the Ashford Independents.

And in May this year, the Tories were deprived of their minority control of Maidstone Borough Council.

Green councillor and parliamentary candidate for Maidstone and Malling, Cllr Stuart Jeffrey, assumed the leadership of the council later in May, leading the Green and Independent Alliance, and bringing Liberal Democrats into the cabinet as well.

Cllr Martin thinks such things herald a bright future for his party.

“I think that the old party politics, in terms of local councils, is dead or dying,” he said.

“Local communities, particularly communities that are struggling need their elected members to work together in solving the problems that beset us: poverty, homelessness, worklessness, climate change, we need to combine to try and work towards a better future for our communities.

“The electorate is demonstrating this by turning away from the main parliamentary parties and voting Green or Independant at local elections.”

FHDC opposition leader Cllr Jenny Hollingbee (Con), however, is much more scathing about the Greens’ record.

“Council finances were left in good order (as confirmed in the official training given to all councillors) and it’s been disappointing to see how little the new council has achieved,” she said.

“Abandoning the plans for a new leisure centre and promenade at Princes Parade will come at a cost to us all.

“Despite the council leader saying Otterpool Park would be built ‘at pace’ the project is delayed at least two years and key members of the project team have been lost.

“This delay puts all parts of the district at risk of speculative development as housing targets are missed.

“The council will need to do a new ‘call for development sites’ to try to fill this gap.”

She also slated the new administration’s planned £100,000 transition from a cabinet to a committee system as a “waste of money”.

She continued: “I have been surprised to see media releases for projects that have come to fruition since the election make no reference to the way the funding, planning and most of the work were done by the previous administration.

“Examples include almost £20m of levelling up funding secured for the town centre in Folkestone, the rural prosperity fund, the net-zero social housing and the new toilets and changing facilities for disabled people in the Lower Leas Coastal Park.

“Labour holds the title of official opposition at the district council but is very close to the Green/Lib Dem cabinet.

“My Conservative group will continue to provide the only real opposition and scrutiny.”

With the general election looming, and 8% of the country saying they plan to vote Green according to YouGov’s latest poll, it remains to be seen if that will translate into national success.