Reform’s crack DOGE team tackling Kent Council – four Reform politicians and a 28-year-old, until the latter almost immediately quit – has uncovered its first example of epic wastage. And what a figure it is!
Head of the party’s Elon Musk-inspired “Department of Government Efficiency”, the hokey-cokeying former chairman Zia Yusuf, claims Kent has been spending a weirdly specific, weirdly round £100m a year on “working from home”, while refusing to provide a jot of evidence for it.
“Kent County Council spends £100,000,000 of taxpayer money per year on employees that ‘work from home,” claimed Yusuf on social media. “Reform’s DOGE team spent several days there and the office was a wasteland. Nobody working.” He also suggested that the council’s chief executive, Amanda Beer, should be personally checking the laptops of individuals working from home to check what they had been doing.
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Opposition members of the council pointed out, not unreasonably, that many jobs are not nine-to-five office roles – on-call social workers, for example – and that line managers regularly dial into employees’ laptops to check they are at work. Meanwhile, a sell-off of council properties in recent years means there isn’t enough space to accommodate everybody anyway.
Others have questioned why, once again, it was Yusuf speaking on behalf of Kent Reform, despite it having 57 elected members. Perhaps it is because they haven’t had the opportunity. Since taking power, the ruling Reform group in Kent has cancelled a third of all council meetings amid accusations that they don’t know what they are doing.
Still, if any home-worker does find their job axed by Reform’s DOGE lackeys and they’re prepared to relocate north, an exciting new opportunity has come up: Reform is hiring a regional director for Yorkshire and the Humber, salary £35-50,000, location: “home working with occasional travel within the region”.
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