Reform's energy bill competition is not all it seems

Reform has unveiled its back-of-a-fag-packet policy to cut household energy bills – saving £200 each by scrapping VAT and green levies.

It’s a costly old policy alright – the research and innovation foundation Nesta calculates it will cost around £2.5 billion per year to implement. Reform says it will pay for it with a “reduction in the budgets of unprotected quangos”. Which quangos? It says it is “conducting an audit” to see. So that sounds fully worked-out then.

More interesting than an uncosted and unfundable policy destined never to see the light of day, though, is how Reform have sought to attract attention to it – with a publicity stunt even Ed Davey would draw the line at. At the website nigelcutmybills.com – because it absolutely isn’t a cult of one man – the party has launched a competition where one winner and their entire street will get their energy bills paid for by the party for a full year.

Simply by handing over all your details to Farage’s party you too could be the one picked – and it’s open to everyone, not just Reform members (all of whose data the party is already in possession of).

Which begs all manner of questions. What precisely does the party intend to do with all that data? Can the lucky winner opt out of publicity, as one can with the National Lottery, avoiding the embarrassment of having to be photographed with Farage, Richard Tice and a large cheque?

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And, most importantly, how does the “and their entire street” work? If you say, live on an inner-city street populated largely by tower blocks – as many of those people being targeted by Farage and his publicity machine may very well do – is the party pledging to fund the bills for a year for every single one of those flats?

In UK law, a street is broadly defined as “any highway, road, lane, footway, square, court, alley or passage, whether a thoroughfare or not, and whether publicly or privately maintained”. Not so for Reform though!

The terms and conditions of the competition state that Reform “may determine what constitutes a ‘street’ or group of residences in its reasonable discretion”. So, er, no, in that case.

Meanwhile, Reform has taken out a full-page advert in the free newspaper Metro, calling for council candidates to come forward before May’s local election, particularly in London, where the party is thought to be struggling to fill slots outside of Bexley, Havering and Barking & Dagenham.

Scan the QR code and you’re taken through to a site where it stresses that “no prior political experience is necessary” as “you will receive free training from our Centre of Excellence”. All you need to apply to stand for the party is to provide a headshot picture, CV, working links for any social media accounts, a scan of your passport and proof of address.

By law, all candidates have to be nominated by April 9, which is 23 days away. Therefore Reform has just over three weeks to get in the applications, vet them, agree on where to fill potentially hundreds of wards and register them with the relevant local authorities. What could possibly go wrong?