Maidstone Council Scorecard: 761 Homes, 47% Recycled

Maidstone Borough Council built fewer homes than it planned to, recycled less than half the borough’s household waste, and saw 2.4 million fewer visits to the town centre than it was aiming for. It also delivered more than twice as many affordable homes as the year before, and cut the number of households in temporary accommodation.

All of it is in the council’s own Annual Performance Report for 2025/26, published on 1 September and going to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday 9 September before Cabinet on 16 September. It is the first full year measured against the Corporate Strategy 2025-2035, and it scores the council against 64 performance indicators.

Where the council missed

Five results stand out.

New homes: 761 against a target of 1,000. This is total additional homes provided across the borough, not just council-built ones. It is up on the previous year but well short.

Recycling: 47.09% against a target of 53%. The share of household waste sent for reuse, recycling and composting improved on last year but missed by nearly six percentage points. Each household produced 802kg of waste.

Town centre footfall: 22,314,127 against a target of 24,750,056. That is 2.4 million visits short, and down on 2024/25. Vacant retail units in the town centre stood at 10.5% as of January 2026, up on the year before.

Council housing repairs: 80.89% completed within 21 days against a target of 90%. The report says the service prioritised safety-critical and urgent repairs while its accommodation portfolio expanded.

Planning appeals: 57.28% of appeals dismissed against a target of 70%. In other words, developers won more appeals against Maidstone than the council expected. The report says this “suggests that further review may be needed to understand the types of appeals being dismissed at the Planning Inspectorate”. A comparison chart puts Maidstone below the average for its group of similar councils.

Two street cleanliness measures narrowly missed: acceptable levels of litter at 97.39% against 98%, and detritus at 92.93% against 95%. Fly-tipping ran to 3,269 incidents, with 84.89% cleared or assessed within four working days against a 96% target.

Where it beat target

Affordable homes: 167 delivered against a target of 160. Council Leader Cllr Stuart Jeffery writes in the report’s foreword that this is “more than double the previous year”.

Private sector homes improved: 245 against a target of 144, plus 52 empty homes brought back into use or demolished.

Museum visitors: 62,151 against a target of 50,000. Maidstone Museum beat its target by nearly a quarter.

Business support: 1,324 businesses and start-ups given information, advice and guidance, against a target of 1,240.

Planning decisions on time: 93.18% of major applications against a 90% target, and 96.86% of minor applications against 95%. All Priority 1 planning enforcement cases were dealt with in time, and open enforcement cases fell from 311 to 261 over the year, the sixth consecutive annual reduction.

On the environment, the council recorded 9,370 trees planted through its own schemes, a 34% rise on the previous year, and 176,279 square metres of land rewilded. Green Flag status was achieved for Brenchley Gardens in 2025, and the borough now has eight Local Nature Reserves with active management plans.

The housing waits nobody advertises

The most striking numbers in the report are not scored against a target at all, because none is set. They are the average waits for a council or housing association home:

The four-bedroom figure carries a footnote: no four-bedroom households were housed at all in the first or fourth quarter of the year, so a full-year average cannot properly be produced.

Alongside those, the report records 1,082 homeless applications, 267 households in temporary accommodation on the last night of the reporting month, 23 rough sleepers accommodated by the council, and 681 households moved into longer-term accommodation.

The Leader’s foreword says temporary accommodation numbers fell “by around a fifth”, against a national trend of rising numbers.

What it means for you

The report is the clearest published account of what the council actually delivers, and several of its numbers connect straight to daily life in the borough.

• If you put out a recycling bin, the borough is recycling 47.09% of household waste and is nearly six points off its own goal. Collection days are on our Maidstone bin collection days page.
• If you are on the housing register, the published average waits are between 514 and 794 days depending on the size of home.
• If you shop in the town centre, footfall fell and one retail unit in ten stood vacant in January.
• If you have objected to a planning application, the council lost more appeals than it planned to, and has said it will look at why.

There is a public question session at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 9 September, at 6.30pm at the Town Hall, High Street. The council asks for questions in writing by 5pm on Monday 7 September, on 01622 602899 or committee@maidstone.gov.uk.

One caveat worth stating: this is the council marking its own homework. The targets are the council’s own, and where an indicator is labelled “for information only” there is no target to miss. The comparisons with other councils in the report use CIPFA nearest-neighbour groupings and, in the case of planning appeals and fly-tipping, run a year behind on 2024/25 data.