Reform’s cost-cutting drive has hit a major stumbling block, according to a senior member of the party’s cabinet.
Nigel Farage established Reform’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in a bid to slash wasteful spending and excessive regulations.
However, the party has found that “there just aren’t” significant savings to be made in one local authority according to a senior Reform cabinet member in Kent.
The cabinet member said: “Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away, but there just aren’t.”
Kent was one of 10 English councils that Nigel Farage gained control of at local elections in May this year.
He vowed to save “a lot of money” by abolishing “wasteful” spending.
Money saved would then be used to invest in Reform UK’s policies, meaning less tax would need to be collected.
A second cabinet member for Kent County Council, Diane Morton, told The Financial Times that services in Kent were already “down to the bare bones”.
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Head of Kent County Council, Linden Kemkaran, speaks during a Reform UK press conference
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She added: “We’ve got more demand than ever before, and it’s growing. We just want more money.”
The cost-cutting scheme, modelled on Elon Musk’s initiative in the US, has not yet undertaken detailed work in Kent, due to tensions over unelected party members gaining access to sensitive council information.
Kent County Council has instead set up “Dolge”, which focuses on local authorities and is run by several cabinet members, instead of Reform’s Zia Yusuf.
Council leader Linden Kemkaran said Kent described the local authority as a “shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform Government might look like”.
Nigel Farage established Reform’s Department of Government Efficiency, which aims to reduce wasteful spending and excessive regulations
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Over the summer, Mr Yusuf said wasteful spending at Kent council, which the Conservatives previously ran, included paying for TV licences for asylum seekers.
The council replied that it has a duty to support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
The majority of Kent’s budget is spent on adult and children’s social care, as well as on children with special educational needs, which together account for about 50 per cent of its £2.5billion annual spending.
As with many local authorities in England, Kent’s is likely to raise council tax rates next year; the maximum allowed is five per cent.
Reform Cllr Linden Kemkaran, leader of the Reform UK Kent County Council group, at County Hall in Maidstone, Kent, ahead of the first full council meeting
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A Reform UK Kent spokesman said: “Our team in Kent County Council have already done some fantastic work to clean up the mess left by the Kent Conservatives and reduce the county council’s debt by £66 million in their first five months in office.
“The majority of that has come from savings as a result of their DOLGE unit.
“This includes implementing a ‘No More Borrowing’ policy which will reduce their debt by a further £33 million by March 2026, scrapping KCC’s Net Zero Renewable Energy Programme to save £32 million over 4 years and stopping the move to a new council building which has avoided an additional £14 billion of borrowing.”