After eight months of searching, Reform's DOGE unit finds... no waste to cut

Taking charge of Kent Council last May, Reform made much of the new, Elon Musk-inspired ‘Doge’ (department of government efficiency) unit they would be sending into its Maidstone headquarters to uncover the hundreds of millions of pounds of waste Nigel Farage insisted would be there to be found.

Kent was the first of Reform’s councils to get the Doge treatment, with Farage saying it would seize and examine documents, reports and records and see what was being spent on consultants, climate change initiatives and “areas that county councils shouldn’t be getting involved in”.

Farage said Reform’s Doge would consist of “software engineers, data analysts and forensic auditors”, although it turned out to be actually comprised of four Reform politicians and a 28-year-old who had said he may be wanted for war crimes in the Philippines (Nathaniel Fried, who quit less than a week in).

Now, after eight months of auditing the waste they inherited, the party has finally conceded that… there wasn’t any. Paul Chamberlain, one of the Reform cabinet members in charge of the so-called Department of Local Government Efficiency [Dolge], told the Financial Times they were expecting to find vast amounts of waste but, er, that had not materialised.

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“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that Doge found in America … and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that,” Chamberlain conceded.

The initiative was launched last summer by Reform’s then chair, now head of policy, Zia Yusuf, who said at the time that the “waste and in some cases corruption” in local councils “is off the charts and a reckoning is coming”. He pinpointed Kent in particular, saying that government officials’ “snouts have been in the trough for too long”.

But at an event in Maidstone last week, Chamberlain said there “just weren’t big cuts to make, because services had already been hacked away for years and years”. “I wish we could have found those big savings for Zia, it would have been a better story, but we didn’t,” he added.

Matthew Fraser Moat, a fellow Kent cabinet member for Dolge, told the FT he was really proud that the Reform council had “not actually made any cuts”, adding “we haven’t cut frontline services other than what the Conservatives had already planned to do”. He said that Reform had actually blocked some of the previous administration’s proposed cuts, including the closure of several libraries.

Meanwhile Reform continues to take the job of running England’s largest local authority seriously. Last week the party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, visited the council and waved around a t-shirt bearing the large slogan “Suck It Up”. This was a reference to comments made by the council’s leader, Linden Kemkaran, who last year was caught on a leaked video defending plans to increase council tax after vowing not to and telling her fellow Reform councillors to “fucking suck it up”. Lovely stuff!