Road closures in Knatts Valley and Kemsing

East Hill Road, Knatts Valley, is due to be closed for much of the next two days. (The part of the road in Sevenoaks North and Darent Valley is in Shoreham Parish). The closure will be from 0930 to 1530 for up to two days starting tomorrow, Thursday 20 April. 

The closure is for Kent County Council to carry out carriageway patching - which reflects the state of the road after winter damage. Since East Hill Road is a No Through Road, there is no alternative route, but Kent Highways adds that ‘Every effort will be made to maintain access for residents whenever it is safe to do so’.

For anyone living in Knatts Valley/ Otford Hills, there is a further closure in the area, of Cotmans Ash Lane, the route between this area and Kemsing. This is described as being on or after the 20th, for up to one day. It is also a Kent Highways closure, in this case related to drainage works.

The Space at Riverside

This morning I visited The Space at the Riverside Club in Eynsford. Established just before Christmas as a Warm Space but focusing increasingly on building community and addressing social isolation, the Space has seen sharply increasing attendance at its Wednesday morning open sessions. (Mean attendance has been 60, but last week it was 97). Just in the hour that I was there this morning (and that was shortly after opening at 9), a growing number of people were coming in.

The Space has been developed by Darent Valley Community Church and has secured grants in its early months from Sevenoaks District Council. It serves food and has provided a warm space over the winter, but its main focus on addressing isolation and offering meals, activities and learning (in particular, in relation to IT) speaks to many of the themes emphasised in KCC’s Framing Kent’s Future and to our emphasis, and that of many public agencies on the role of social links and contacts in strengthening both individuals and communities.

My thanks to Adrian Elms, Pastor of DVCC and all those involved in The Space who made me so welcome this morning. I expect to be back.

Helping Kent residents through the crisis

I have recently - and rather belatedly - come across a Facebook post by Citizens Advice in North and West Kent  concerning my visit to the  Kent Money Advice Hub kiosk in Gravesham Borough Council’s offices on 3 March. CAB, along with colleagues from Kent County Council and Gravesham BC made me very welcome and it was a valuable and informative visit. It’s worth drawing attention to the Money Advice Hub as an exemplar of the work that KCC and its partners are undertaking to help Kent residents at a time of severe financial pressure.

The Money Advice Hub is part of our Financial Hardship Programme, which includes and has built on the Helping Hands Scheme, launched in February 2021 with £10 million from the Covid Emergency Grant. Other elements of the scheme include the strengthening of Referrals and Data Sharing between councils. Much of the focus is on ensuring that services and support are available to the residents already entitled to them, and that we help residents build their financial resilience. 

Helping Hands and the Financial Hardship Programme go alongside our delivery of the central government funded Household Support Fund (launched in September 2021). In the first two rounds of funding, over 450,000 awards were made to Kent residents. This has covered areas such as food vouchers for Free School Meal eligible families, energy vouchers, support with water bills, funding passed to District and Borough Councils and more. The third round of the Fund has just been delivered, while a £22 million fourth round (announced recently) runs for a full year to March 2024. 

All told, this is a strong programme of support to Kent residents through the cost of living crisis, and it is set out in a very helpful and comprehensive report in the papers for the 30 March KCC Cabinet meeting. You can find the paper here, and the webcast of the discussion of the item here.

Hewitt Review: hope and experience

The Review of Integrated Care Systems by Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt, Health Secretary in the Blair government and commissioned by the current Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, was published today. It is a very welcome report; the question now will be how and to what degree it is implemented.

The focus of the Review was on the 42 Integrated Care Systems (ICS) established last summer under the Health and Care Act 2022. Its Terms of Reference included greater empowerment (and accountability) for local ICS leaders, a reduction in national target setting and an enhanced role for the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in oversight of the system.

Local government is a key partner in the ICS; within our system of Kent and Medway, and in particular its Integrated Care Partnership (ICP), which I chair, the three statutory partners are Kent County Council, Medway Council and the local NHS or Integrated Care Board (ICB). The County Councils Network played an important part in the Review (acknowledged by Patricia Hewitt in her Foreword), as did its Chairman, Tim Oliver (Leader of Surrey CC). I was able to take part in a number of ICS and local government leaders' calls with Patricia Hewitt and her inclusive approach was clear.

I cannot claim to have yet fully read and absorbed an 88 page report, but its general approach was increasingly clear as the Review developed and is confirmed today. The Review identifies six key principles:

- Collaboration within and between systems and national bodies

- A limited number of shared priorities

- Allowing local leaders the space and time to lead

- The right support

- Balancing freedom with accountability

- Enabling access to timely, transparent and high-quality data 

These principles aim to deliver a shift from focusing on illness to promoting health, with a shift in ICS budgets towards prevention of at least 1% over 5 years; more freed up and autonomous local systems; reducing the barriers between primary and social care and developing complementary strategies for health and care workforces; and shifting the approach to finance to embed change.

These are good aims, and the Review is full of accurate and important assessments of our current situation, with its over-centralisation, its fragmented approach and the degree to which we are, and remain on a treadmill of dealing with pressures within the system rather than addressing the factors that make those pressures worse. For example: "We are currently one of the most centralised health systems in the world, and ICSs give us an opportunity to rebalance this."

The challenge now will be to deliver on this. One section of the Review has the title 'Why it can be different this time' and Patricia Hewitt recognises (not least from her own experience as a former Secretary of State) that prevention, integration,moving upstream and financial sustainability have long been national policy aims. Her contention - and this is a view that I have argued in our debates on the ICS at County Council - is that strong cross-party support for ICSs, building on the experience of recent years, gives the opportunity to truly do things differently. 

Let us hope so.

Three days left for street party road closures applications

As at the time of last year’s Platinum Jubilee, KCC has waived fees on road closures for people seeking to celebrate His Majesty the King’s Coronation with a street party. However, there are now just three days left in which to submit an application - they must be presented by this Friday, 3 March.

You can find our media release about waiving fees here. We will be posting more about the Coronation weekend in the near future.

Kent Stands with Ukraine on invasion anniversary

Today Kent County Council, like so many organisations, communities and individuals across the country, marked the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Amid the horror and shattering cruelty of the invasion, and the indirect impacts that the resulting economic disruption has brought home to all of us in daily life, there has also been a heartening response in this country and our allies, not least in the welcome given to Ukrainians forced to flee the conflict. In Kent, which has taken more Ukrainian guests under the Homes for Ukraine scheme than any other comparable area of the country, we have seen an extraordinary response from people across the county.

Some 4,202 people from Ukraine have been matched with 1,737 sponsors in Kent. Not all have yet come here, but 3,209 have done so. At present, 1,889 are staying with 905 sponsors; others have already done so and moved on, in some cases returning to Ukraine and in other cases moving into the private rented sector. 

Last year there was concern that, once the six month minimum period for hosting came to an end, many hosting arrangements would come to an end. KCC moved ahead of many other councils in raising the rates for payments to hosts from a flat rate £350 per month, regardless of the numbers hosted, to a higher set of rates ranging from £400 per month for hosting one Ukrainian guest to £1,000 per month for 7 or more. This seems to have had an effect; instead of 60% of hosting arrangements coming to an end after 6 months, as we feared, just 7% did so. 

This scheme was set to run through until the end of the financial year in March 2023, since there was at that time uncertainty over future provisions for the scheme. DLUHC confirmed before Christmas that there would be a continuation of the scheme into financial year 2023-24, though with reduced payments to councils but an increase (to £500) in payments to hosts of Ukrainians who have been in the country for over a year. This payment does not, however, increase if there are more guests. KCC has therefore announced that we will, for the next twelve months, support hosts in line with the scheme we had previously announced, but with a higher payment (£500 rather than £400) for single guests who have been here for over 12 months. In other words, we will combine the government’s provisions with our own.

The aim of these schemes is to sustain hosting arrangements but over time many Ukrainian guests will want or need to seek other housing. We are therefore working with district councils across the county, and in particular Sevenoaks District Council, to facilitate an increasing number of moves by Ukrainian guests into the private rented sector.

Our strongest wish is that the day comes soon when our guests are able to return to a free, unified and peaceful Ukraine. But in the meantime several thousand Ukrainians are becoming a valued part of the Kent community, and it is good to be able to support that. 

You can find the KCC media release on this here.

Road closures coming up in Shoreham and Crockenhill

A couple of road closures coming up in the area in the near future are for very different reasons.

Fackenden Lane in Shoreham will be closed for up to 4 days starting this Friday (24 February) for its full length, from the junction with the A225 to the junction with Magpie Bottom. This is to enable Kent Highways to carry out carriageway patching - which is welcome given the severe damage that this road has taken during the winter weather. There have been an increasing number of road closures for Kent Highways works recently, reflecting work getting under way to repair the winter damage.

In Crockenhill, the closure of Wested Lane for works carried out by Network Rail, which has been delayed several times, is now scheduled to run from 0600 on 15 March to 1800 on 22 March. The closure will be between Eynsford Road and the Mark Luck Ltd entrance in Wested Lane near the junction with the B2173 London Road in Swanley. The recommended diversion route is via Eynsford Road/ Main Road, Broadway/Green Court Road/Goldsel Road and the B2173.