Reform UK has ignored requests to share the evidence for its claim to have saved £331m since it took charge of 10 English councils in May, prompting questions over whether the figure is true.
The party has boasted that it had achieved £331m worth of savings at English councils it controls. Warning of a “blob” of vested interests devoted to “ripping off” taxpayers, Richard Tice, the new head of the party’s self-styled ‘Doge’ cost-cutting unit, added: “We’re going to war with these people”.
Yet on closer analysis, examples of supposed savings at councils ranging from Durham to its “showcase” Kent appear questionable. In some cases, credit is claimed for initiatives already set in train by predecessors.
When the supposed savings initiatives described by Reform are totted up, there is still an unexplained shortfall of £260m. Reform’s press team repeatedly told the Guardian that a full list detailing the £331m in savings had been produced and would be shared. But despite numerous requests since Monday, it has not been provided.
Local government experts say it was always going to be a struggle for Reform to identify wasted spending that could be cut without signifiant trade-offs in services.
“They are not coming into this at a point where everyone else has sat idly by until now,” said Stuart Hoddinott, associate director of the public services team at the Institute for Government (IfG).
There are potential ways of making local government more efficient, he added, but they would mostly require upfront investment. A case in point is IT, where Tice’s ‘Doge’ predecessor, Zia Yusuf, had bemoaned the wasted staff time due to “genuinely ancient” systems.
Reform will struggle to find wasteful spending, agreed Prof Tony Travers, a local government expert at the London School of Economics, who said their council leaders had inherited the same legacy of austerity which predecessors had struggled with.
“The things they have majored on, like eliminating spending on diversity programmes, were never more than tiny amounts of money,” he added.
“I’ve just looked at the latest draft budget plans by Reform-controlled councils this week and what is striking is how similar they are to the approaches of Labour and Conservative controlled councils. There is a limited number of ways in which you can deliver libraries or other services when money is tight. There isn’t a left wing or right wing way of filling pot-holes.”
So on the claims Reform has explained in more detail, how do the numbers stack up?
Action: Scrapping a plan to transition Kent county council’s vehicle fleet to electric by 2030.
Claimed saving: £7.5m
The supposed saving has been cited by Linden Kemkaran, Reform’s leader of Kent county council, who claimed the party was bringing a “laser-like” focus to savings.
However, calculations by the council’s own officials stress that going ahead with switching its fleet over to electric would in fact save the local authority up to £100,000 per year.
Reform’s claim that avoiding the upfront costs is a money-saver is therefore “bogus”, said Green councillor Stuart Heaver. “It assumes those electric vehicles would not need to be replaced with anything,” he added.
The transition plans are also described as a “potential forthcoming project” in the 2025-26 council budget plan, with £5m not due to be spent until 2029-30.
“It’s quite easy to ‘cut’ spending you weren’t planning to make for three years,” said the Kent Liberal Democrat leader Antony Hook.
A council spokesperson said the council would have needed to borrow to fund the £7.5m cost of the transition. She added that it cost £1.4m a year to maintain the existing fleet of 213 vehicles.
The IfG’s Stuart Hoddinott said not buying the EV vehicles was a short term move that could store up future costs.
“You might save some capital budget and money in the short term but you are still left with having to run a fleet of vehicles that are old and require maintenance.”
Action: Pulling out of a project for electric car charging in Staffordshire
Claimed saving: £4m
Reform-controlled Staffordshire county council announced last month that new charging points for electric vehicles – a bete noire for the climate change skeptic party – “are set to be refocused.”
Rather than being sited on Staffordshire town streets, the party wants the points to be in publicly owned car parks to “reflect the county’s rural nature and wider community needs”.
Yet while the move was being presented in reports this week as a saving, no agreement appears has been reached on whether the money from a central government grant can be spent in a different way.
The Department for Transport said officials recently met with Staffordshire county council to discuss a new application, which had yet to received.
“The fundamentals are that this is not council tax money being spent. It’s a ringfenced grant linked to a specific scheme,” said Philip White, leader of the Conservative group on the council.
A Staffordshire county council spokesperson said: “We are currently working with the government to develop a new plan for a grant to be spent on community/public charging locations in Staffordshire.”
Action: Agreeing new IT contract in Lincolnshire and Lancashire
Claimed saving: £30m and £1.7m
The agreement of a new IT contract was listed as one of the party’s “achievements” in its first 100 days of controlling Lincolnshire county council.
“We’re ambitious about what can be achieved when we look at new ways of working to improve things,” said the council’s Reform UK leader, Sean Matthews, as the party claimed credit for a new IT partnership with Irish company Version 1.
What Matthews did not mention, say the opposition Conservatives, who previously controlled the council, is that the new service was designed over recent years and was awarded to a company already designated as a “preferred bidder”.
“By the time they had taken over in May all of the major decisions had been made. Councillors don’t design IT contracts,” said Richard Davies, leader of the council’s Tory group, who gave credit to non-party council officials.
A Lincolnshire county council spokesperson said “the final moderation” of the procurement was after the election and the new administration were “heavily involved.”
Similar questions arise at Lancashire county council, where reports suggested Reform was claiming credit for saving £1.7m in IT and digital services. Aidy Riggott, leader of the council’s Conservative group, said a new digital strategy had already been under way before Reform took control, which included rationalising the number of IT licences used by staff.
Action: cancelling the sale of Kent county council’s headquarters in Maidstone
Claimed savings: £14m
Plans to sell the ageing municipal building where Reform’s “flagship” county council is based were scrapped in one of the first actions taken by the party after its sweeping local election wins.
The council’s leader, Linden Kemkaran, told of her surprise at how much was being spent on moving to a new office and argued that it made more sense to stay put as it was unclear whether the authority might yet be abolished under an overhaul of local government.
Yet the logic of the decision is hotly contested by opposition councillors, who note that the building is in a decrepit state and will cost £65m to bring up to scratch for permanent use.
A council report in September noted that the continued running costs are estimated at £2.3 to 2.6m, with £16m worth of spending envisaged as needed before 2027.
A council spokesperson said the £14m was a “direction of travel” figure and that an analysis found £12m would be saved in capital costs against the current borrowing assumptions. A “minimum expenditure” would be deployed to make the building usable by staff and members, they added.
Action: Reforming special educational needs and disabilities provision and local government pension schemes
Claimed savings: “millions” / £8-10bn
Reform UK have not put a figure on the biggest ticket spending which the party is promising significant savings on.
Special educational needs and disabilities spending is one of the most fraught issues in politics, with councils heading for debts of £18bn by the end of the decade due to increasing numbers of children requiring extra teaching support in schools.
Tice claimed on Tuesday that neurodiverse conditions like ADHD were being overdiagnosed, and suggested that councils could save millions by scrapping annual reviews of education and health care plans, the legal documents entitling children to support from local authorities.
However, it’s unclear how councils could do this, given their statutory obligations to deliver the ECHPs. Any change is theoretical barring the kind of sweeping central government legislation that Labour is struggling with.
On local government pension schemes (LGPs), which are statutory for employees working in local government in England and Wales, Tice has claimed the investment fees associated with them are “egregious” and that the 13 councils included in a Reform analysis are overpaying by £265m in just one year. The Reform deputy leader has also accused pension providers of “underperformance” and “investing in woke things”.
This is a “strange line of attack,” according to the IfG’s Stuart Hoddinott, who cited reports that LGPs had seen a significant improvement in funding levels amid large surpluses.
“Overall my impression is that these schemes overall seem to be doing quite well, to the point where they have been able to reduce contributions.”
More generally, he said, the idea that sweeping savings are available appears unlikely. “Most of the easy savings that could have been made, have been made,” he added. “Almost all local authorities are at the point where they are making really difficult trade offs.”
