Cornwall Council's absent chief executive — and what the council will not say

The councillors were told by telephone the evening before, on Thursday 3 September. Four of them, from four different parties, spoke on the record to Voice Newspapers the following day. None of them had been given a reason, and two of the four sit on the committee that would meet to deal with it.

Cllr Martyn Alvey, a Conservative and a member of the committee, said he had learned of it during a phone call checking his availability for the meeting. “I know no more than what has been put out in the brief statement from Cornwall Council,” he said. He dismissed the speculation already circulating as “kite-flying”: “There are many kites being flown, but I haven’t heard anything through any official sources.”

Cllr Paul Ashton, chairman of the Reform UK group — the largest single party on the council, and its opposition — is also a member of the committee. “Even though I am opposition leader, I have not been made aware of the details or circumstances around the situation,” he said. “All I know is that she’s on extended leave. As a member of the chief executive employment committee, I will be attending the meeting on Wednesday, but I can’t say any more than that, which is disappointing.”

Cllr Kate Ewert, for Labour, asked the practical question: “the council needs someone to be running the show, which is what she normally does, and if she’s not there, who is running it?” Cllr Steven Webb, a Liberal Democrat, took the opposite view — that whatever the reason, “this is a private matter between Kate Kennally and her employer, that is to say Cornwall Council.”

Both positions are reasonable, and the gap between them is the live question. An employee’s private business is private. But the holder of a statutory office is not only an employee, and the council has to be run by somebody.

The Chief Officers’ Employment Committee is the cross-party body responsible for the council’s most senior officers, including the chief executive’s remuneration. It is chaired by the leader of the council. It does not meet often: it met on 3 June 2026 and then not again for three months.

It has now met once and been scheduled twice more inside eight weeks: 9 September 2026, then 25 September 2026 and 29 October 2026. Two of the three have published an agenda, and both carry the same pair of items — a resolution to exclude the press and public, and an item called “Chief Officer Matters”. The third has no papers at all: ModernGov says its agenda appears in the week before the meeting, so nothing is yet known about what will be on it.

The grounds for exclusion are printed on the agenda. Four of the descriptions of exempt information in the Local Government Act 1972 are cited:

• 1. Information relating to an individual
• 2. Information which is likely to reveal the identity of an individual
• 3. Information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information)
• 5. Information in respect of which a claim to legal professional privilege could be maintained in legal proceedings

The first three are what any council cites for any personnel item. The fourth is not. A claim to legal professional privilege is the ground a public body relies on when the material it is discussing includes legal advice it has taken. It is not evidence of a dispute, and it would be wrong to read it as one — authorities take legal advice on all sorts of routine arrangements, and a committee may cite a ground it never has to use. It is simply a thing the agenda says, on a matter about which nothing else has been said.

As at 21 September 2026, no minutes had been published for the meeting of 9 September 2026. The committee’s page for that meeting carries an agenda frontsheet and a reports pack, and nothing else. The report for 25 September 2026 is marked “To follow”.

None of this is improper. A council is entitled to handle a personnel matter in private, and the exclusions are the ones the legislation provides for. The observation is narrower: every formal step taken about the absence of Cornwall’s most senior officer has so far happened in a room the public cannot enter, and has left no published record of any kind.

On 4 September, Cllr Alvey understood that the committee was meeting to discuss appointing an interim chief executive. What was announced a week later was something narrower. On 11 September the council said Andy Keeling had been appointed interim deputy chief executive, starting on Monday 14 September. Keeling was chief executive of the Falkland Islands government from 2021 to 2025 and, before that, chief operating officer at Leicester City Council. Cllr Frost said he had a wealth of experience and would “provide valuable leadership at an important time”.

A council spokesperson explained the distinction: there could not be two chief executives at the same time, but an officer could deputise if the chief executive was absent.

That sentence is the most informative thing the council has said. It means Kate Kennally has not been replaced. As at 21 September 2026 she remains, on the council’s own website, its Chief Executive and the head of its paid service, with her council email address published — a statutory role every English council must have somebody in. The interim deputy does not appear on that page at all.

On 15 September, Full Council met. Among the questions submitted by members of the public was one from a Mr Rickard of St Dennis, printed in the council’s own agenda papers under the heading “Chief Executive’s Absence”: “Can someone please tell me the reason for Kate Kennally’s absence?”

Cllr Frost, sitting beside the new interim deputy, replied that he understood the public interest in the matter, but that he could not provide any further details, because “personnel matters are treated with the same degree of confidentiality for all members of staff regardless of their seniority.”

It is a defensible answer, and a consistent one. It is also the point at which the public record stops. A resident asked the council a question at the council’s own meeting, and the council’s answer was that the answer is confidential. There is no further forum in which to ask it.

Cornwall Council’s Pay Policy Statement for 2026/27, approved by Full Council on 24 February 2026, sets the chief executive’s pay at a spot salary of £208,114 — a single point rather than a range, which the statement says means increases are limited to national pay awards unless the Chief Officers’ Employment Committee determines otherwise. The same statement gives that committee responsibility for the chief executive’s remuneration.

The figures more widely reported come from a different year and a different document. The TaxPayers’ Alliance Town Hall Rich List 2026, compiled from councils’ published accounts for 2024/25, records a base salary of £201,661, rising to £239,479 including pension and expenses. Both the BBC and CornwallLive carried those figures. They are not in conflict with the pay policy statement; they describe an earlier year.

The reason the money is worth stating precisely is that it sets the scale of what is being decided in private. It is also worth recording, plainly, what the council’s own transparency rules would require if this ended in a settlement: Cornwall Council publishes a policy on the governance and transparency of senior exit payments of £100,000 and over. Nothing in the public record suggests that policy has been engaged, and this page does not suggest it. The rule is noted so that readers know it exists and what it would oblige the council to publish.

This section exists because the gaps in this story are larger than the findings, and a reader is entitled to know exactly where the record ends.

Three things would move this story, and all three are things the council itself controls.

1. The Chief Officers’ Employment Committee on 25 September 2026. Its “Chief Officer Matters” report is marked “to follow”, and the press and public are again to be excluded. A third meeting follows on 29 October 2026, for which no agenda has been published yet.
2. Minutes. Even a minute of a private item records that a decision was taken. None has been published for 9 September 2026.
3. The council’s own leadership page. As at 21 September 2026 it still names Kate Kennally as Chief Executive. A change there — an interim title, or a removal — would be the first formal signal of a change in the position.

Cornwall Political Watch checks all three automatically each week and will update this page when any of them moves.

This page is built entirely from Cornwall Council’s own published record and from on-the-record statements already carried by named news outlets. Every source was read on 21 September 2026. Nothing here comes from a confidential briefing, a leaked document or an anonymous source, and no private information about any individual is published.