A Reform UK-run council where the party sought to pilot drastic cost-cutting plans is going to have to raise council tax, a cabinet member has admitted.
Services at Kent county council were already “down to the bare bones”, said Reform’s cabinet member for adult social care, Diane Morton. It makes Kent the latest local authority controlled by Nigel Farage’s party to signal its intention to raise council tax.
“We’ve got more demand than ever before and it’s growing,” Morton told the Financial Times. “We just want more money.”
Morton said she believed the local authority would raise council tax by 5% – the maximum permitted – as councils try to honour their legal duty to make sure spending adds up before budgets are set for next year.
Reform’s leader of West Northamptonshire council said last month that council tax was “highly likely” to go up next year.
The Reform leader of Durham county council has also said that without additional funding from central government it will have to make “stark choices between council tax increases and cuts to vital local services”.
Staffordshire county council’s Reform leader, Ian Cooper, said last month he hoped to reduce a 5% council tax rise, but added: “Whether we can deliver that based on inflation … we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Morton’s comments are particularly pertinent because in Kent Reform had been seeking to pilot an Elon Musk-style “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit to examine all council spending in areas it controls and cut costs.
Instead, a “UK Doge” team led by Reform’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, appears to have run into difficulty in accessing sensitive council data at Kent and elsewhere.
Polly Billington, the Labour MP for East Thanet in Kent, said: “Reform’s leader in Kent said that Reform councils were ‘the biggest advert’ for what a Nigel Farage government would look like.
“Well, she’s right. Now we know what putting Reform in charge means: huge promises about savings, then failing to find any because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the admission of a looming council tax rise in Kent was a “spectacular failure” for which Yusuf must “personally apologise”.
“Reform’s pledge to slash millions from Kent council’s budget has turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. Just like his idol Elon Musk, Zia Yusuf has spectacularly failed to deliver what ‘Doge’ promised,” she said,
Kent county council is one of the largest local authorities in England by population and has a £2.5bn annual budget. Half of spending goes to social care and children with special educational needs (SEN). It has already announced it is facing a shortfall of £50m for the next financial year.
Farage has suggested Kent could make savings by cutting the amount it spends on school transport.
However, independent experts such as the Institute for Government have said that Reform-run local councils face “the same brutal arithmetic” as those its political opponents control.
While the party has suggested it could look at spending in areas it regards as wasteful, such as diversity and equality programmes, the IFG said this year that the numbers did not stack up and previous councils that had been tempted to make short-term spending cuts had only stored problems for the future.
For example, the thinktank said that diverting funding for Kent’s family hub – a network aimed at assisting children and young people, including those with SEN – would be a false economy in terms of the long-term savings it produces, and would also face legal challenges.
