Reform finding local government more taxing than it thought

Reform were bullish when they took control of Kent Council back in May, announcing their new Elon Musk-inspired ‘DOGE’ unit would find easy savings to slash the authority’s spending.

Leader Nigel Farage described the level of spending by the council on some services as “beyond belief” and insisted that his party was “going to save a lot of money”.

And Linden Kemkaran, the Reform council’s leader, said Kent was a test bed for the party’s national policies and the “shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform government might look like”.

Now, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, Farage’s mob has discovered that local government spending is rather more complicated than they initially thought – and rather than slash spending, Kent is about to increase council tax.

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Nearly six months after taking control, a senior Reform councillor has been quoted by the Financial Times as saying the party expected to raise council tax by the maximum permitted rate of five percent next year – the very first time it sets the rate.

Diane Morton, cabinet member for adult social care on the council, told the paper that services in Kent were already “down to the bare bones” and they needed “more money”.

“We’ve got more demand than ever before and it’s growing,” she said. “We just want more money.” Asked how council tax would rise, she said: “I think it’s going to be five percent”, adding that every one percent increase would equate to an extra £10 million raised.

Zia Yusuf, the party’s hokey-cokeying former chair, had been most insistent that cuts in Kent would be simple, specifically saying the Reform council would stop paying for TV licences for asylum seekers. But that failed when they realised those were paid for by the Home Office, not the council. “We’re not looking at asylum at all … it isn’t in our budget,” a cabinet member said.

Another Reform council cabinet member told the FT: “Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away but there just aren’t.” Who’d have thunk it?