Kent's Blue Badge of Shame

Blue Badge renewals by Kent County Council are taking a minimum of FOUR MONTHS to process from the time of supplying the required documents.

An email response (received while chasing a badge related issue for a West Folkestone resident) from the Blue Badge team confirms:

"We currently have a 4-month timescale from when we receive all correct documentation. After reviewing your application, we can see that we had received it on 24.02.2025. This is when the timescale would have started taking you to the 10th week."

This sounds incredible to me. Worse, I understand renewal notices are only posted out three months in advance of the blue badge expiry date.

Thus there is a system that pretty much GUARANTEES that people are left without a blue badge for upwards of a month, maybe two. That's EVEN if you respond immediately to the renewal notice.

This means people are getting trapped in their homes, or receiving fines, for parking as they usually would but with an expired blue badge that they have absolutely no power to renew before it lapses.

AT THE VERY LEAST, surely renewal letters could go out 6 months in advance of lapse, giving the resident at least a sporting chance of getting a replacement permit before the old one lapses.

But also it doesn't take longer to process everything today, rather than in 16 weeks. You do the same amount of work, except you if you sit on it you have to keep answering questions (like this one) on where it is! It takes LONGER to sit on it.

If the process has failed so badly that the Blue Badge team are now out of control on this backlog, I've today asked KCC what measures they are putting in place to bring processing times back to something approaching reasonable (which I'd probably describe as "if they respond reasonably quickly to the renewal letter with the right documents, they'll get another one before the original lapses")?

And if there are insufficient resources within KCC to both tackle the backlog and then keep on top of renewals, how can our district parking teams support the process, as the gap in badges is causing a disproportionate amount of distress to local residents and work for district teams having to deal with appeals against parking offences issued to those with lapsed badges.

The basic minimum would be to make direct contact with those district parking teams, right now, to explain the current delay, and ask them to extend any grace period on a lapsed blue badge to be extended sufficiently to ensure people are not being fined for a failure which is not theirs.

At this time, the grace period in Folkestone and Hythe is a week. With this level of backlog at Kent then with confirmation from KCC maybe 2 months should be allowed, and could at least save some distress?

I've written today the Richard Smith, Head of the responsible Adult Social Care Directorate, asking for some urgent responses and action on blue badge renewal at Kent County Council. 

Maybe at least my "no cost" suggestions of issuing renewal notices earlier, and right now asking District teams to extend grace periods, can be acted on as requiring no additional resource.