Joey Gwinn is a parliamentary assistant, researcher, and a former county and city council candidate.
When Reform gained thirteen councils in last May’s local elections, it was fair to say they’d pulled off a resounding success – startling too, given the lack of ground campaigning in many of the areas where they performed their best.
True too was that it became clear that Reform’s ability to govern would indeed at least be partially tested before the next general election. Farage left little room for clarity for what his voters should expect – an end to opportunist, dishonest and self-serving politics at council levels. It was asserted that Britain was broken.
Just a year on, Reform has shown no willing, desire or ability to fix it, and it is becoming astonishingly clear that, on both a local and national level, Reform has already began disproportionately failing their own voters.
Farage’s three core pledges for local administration last year were to reduce debt, reduce council tax, and reduce waste – promises which any canvasser could tell you cut deeply through to the electorate. Within a year, Reform’s 13 councils have already spectacularly about-turned on all three.
Combined, Reform-led councils have already committed to £2.31 billion in borrowing in budgets written and approved by themselves – with every single council proposing to use borrowing to fund a considerable part of their capital projects programmes.
At £446.3 million, Durham County Council – of which former GB News presenter Darren Grimes is the deputy leader and finance portfolio holder, is the most egregious. Worse still, the four-year extent of their budget means that such a large amount will be borrowed over a much shorter timeframe than many other Reform Councils. Lincolnshire’s much longer nine-year plan will add over half the council’s entire pre-reform debt to the council’s balance sheets.
Now it must be noted that borrowing for capital projects is neither inherently wrong or unusual – every council uses borrowing as a funding mechanism for investments in infrastructure, be it for highways or health. Many sensible councils use such borrowing prudently – it is not called prudential borrowing for nothing. But the fact remains that Reform last year pledged to end the practice. Any such pledge has completely evaporated from campaign materials this year.
Gone too are any of Farage’s ill-fated pledges to cut council tax, after tax hikes proposed for consultation by all of Reform’s councils in December and January were met with backlash so severe that Reform’s Worcestershire Deputy Leader resigned from the party live on BBC Politics Midlands in protest. At 8.98 per cent, Reform’s Worcestershire council tax raid was by far the most severe of any across the country. Very few Reform councils backed down and reduced any of the increases at all after consultation; Derbyshire County Council even went as far as to boast that its rise reduction of 0.09 per cent from their original plans meant its 4.90 per cent hike was markedly different from the 5per cent legal maximum.
Some councillors have even gone as far as to describe any increase below the legal maximum as an effective tax cut – anyone seriously believing this would also have to accept that Rachel Revee’s 2025 budget featured a £14 billion tax cut because her 2024 budget contained £40 billion worth of increases.
Perhaps the best explanation for why Reform councillors have so dramatically failed to achieve the first two of these core pledges is because both they and Reform HQ so pitifully attempted to deliver on the third.
Originally touted as the silver bullet to gut waste, Reform’s DOGE team was supposed to demonstrate at council level what a Reform-ran treasury could do at a national level. Instead, DOGE all but collapsed just a week into its June 2025 operations.
In Kent, Zia Yusuf – then head of DOGE, claimed they had found over £2.8 million worth of fraud in the county council’s 2024-25 budget – rapidly found by Reuters to be completely unfounded.
In West Northamptonshire, Reform’s own councillors, who’d been elected on the DOGE platform just weeks earlier, broke relations with DOGE because the team failed to submit legally required documents. The council said DOGE displayed “naivety and a lack of understanding” of local government.
Reform-led Derbyshire gave up on DOGE entirely and ended up having to spend £5 million on external consultants to complete the job properly.
For all the pledges of Farage, Yusuf and candidates alike, it would have been known from the outset that DOGE never had any legal authority to access any council data, voiding the entire premise of a promised forensic financial investigation unit at conception. DOGE was merely a short-lived photocall unit – an embarrassing stain banished from any Reform official’s memory.
More shocking is the additional waste that Reform’s own councillors have lavished on to budgets at their voters’ expense.
Reform Lincolnshire County Council spent £1,325 to widen three parking spaces at the County Hall reserved for the leader, deputy leader and council chair – allegedly to cater for their Leader’s SUV, yet they mooted a policy of de-asphalting some rural roads as a means of reducing pothole maintenance spending – potentially reducing many roads in their core Lincolnshire heartlands to gravel surfacing. This was dropped after significant Conservative backlash, but signals yet another departure from Farage’s original stance on potholes.
Reform-led Nottinghamshire managed to spend £75,000 on purchasing 164 flags to be erected on lampposts across the county – a figure Nottinghamshire Conservatives have pointed out could have filled a thousand potholes. An FOI request has showed that Nottinghamshire county councillors have also managed to eat £5,357 worth of biscuits and cakes provided at meetings since Reform swept most seats last May – the equivalent of 66,136 Jammy Dodgers in a chamber of just 66.
These three broken promises alone demonstrate so painfully the negative impact Reform’s governance has already had on people’s lives – with their own voters often being the worst affected. For a party founded on voters fed up of feeling lied to and unheard, it is remarkable just how quickly every single one of their core promises have been thrown onto the bonfire.
Remarkable too are the products of their councillors’ own localised decision making.
In Durham, Reform councillors have withdrawn grant funding for 50 voluntary and community groups including adult social care and elderly loneliness initiatives.
Going further, Reform councillors in Derbyshire and Lancashire have closed ten adult residential care centres and nine day care centres between them, pushing Residents to use private providers – in Derbyshire’s case costing 200 jobs. Whilst suggestions that Reform’s official policy is to replace the NHS with an insurance-based system are histrionic, it cuts painfully close to the bone that Reform’s only record on taxpayer-funded health and social care is one of gutting and privatisation.
And in Lincolnshire, one of the first acts of the incoming administration was to scrap the council’s flooding committee, despite the fact that Lincolnshire is one of the UK’s most flood-prone counties and has Britain’s most at-risk constituency with 91% of buildings classified as under threat of flood – Richard Tice’s Boston and Skegness, no less.
Nationally, look at any number of the thousands of homogenous Reform X fan accounts and you’ll be met with whole tranches of authoritative-toned support for promises which are not actually Reform policy any longer – including the basic rate income tax uplift to £20,000 which Farage scrapped at a purpose-held press conference in November.
Even popular policies that Reform have kept are fundamentally flawed and in an unworkable state – Zia Yusuf’s Operation Restoring Justice policy paper was published four months late and contains just three and a half pages of bullet pointed text and 38 spelling and grammar errors.
That Zia Yusuf tweeted just a week ago that ‘failed Tories were trying to infiltrate’ them to ‘destroy’ their agenda ‘from within’, and that the right-wing press are spreading lies about Reform because they ‘are an arm of the Tory party’, shows just where Reform’s attention isn’t focused. One must wonder if he’s already bracing them for disappointment.
Furthermore, Yusuf, Braverman, and Reform’s Head of Policy James Orr, have all asserted a concoction of justifications for openness to ‘socialist’ economic policies and declarations that Reform is not a right-wing party. Reform seem to have completely missed the point that their voters are voting for them because they outright reject leftist decline ideologies.
It is clear that Reform have no intention to deliver on the promises that their support base has been built upon.
But if you are still not convinced, hear it from Reformers themselves.
Patrick Benham‑Crosswell resigned as a Reform Senedd candidate in March this year saying, “The Reform Party has betrayed its early members’ vision, labour and achievements” and that “politics is a dirty game, but Reform have sunk deep into a sewer when it should have been a beacon of decency”. Another Senedd candidate, resigning three days later, asserted Reform selected candidates with “little to no connection to the communities they seek to represent” and stating that Reform was no longer compatible with his Christian faith.
Reform’s deputy group leader in Cornwall said that his own views and priorities “for how best to serve local residents” had “increasingly diverged” from Reform’s platform, resigned from the party last October to “continue representing [his] community with honesty and independence”.
Defecting to the Conservatives a month later, Dartford Borough councillor James Buchan tore into Reform, for “relying on rhetoric and slogans” and having “a pretty unfortunate way of treating people“. He asserted that, having seen how Reform operates, he “concluded that the party doesn’t really have the experience or ambition” to help the real working families who look to Reform for support.
Finally, in recent days, the account for Reform’s Rayleigh and Wickford branch has blasted their party’s own wider local elections campaign for having a near total universal disregard for local issues, along with a photo starkly contrasting their own cookie cutter scantily-detailed templated leaflet with the local Conservative candidate’s own heavily localised three-page fold-out.
In all, through resignations and defections, Reform voters last May have already lost over 1 in 10 of the councillors they elected.
As Labour and the Conservatives have so painfully found out, the cardinal sin of politics in contemporary Britain is to accomplish the promises made to the loyalist of their own voters. In the last year, through policy U-turns, manifesto breaches and local failures, Reform have shown a completely contemptuous disregard for the trust of those who’ve supported them the most.
Almost every poll now shows that Reform have now already lost around 1 in 5 of their prospective voters compared to their early autumn peak. Perhaps Reform’s voters are already realising that where Reform wins, they are the ones who lose the most.
Joey Gwinn is a parliamentary assistant, researcher, and a former county and city council candidate.
When Reform gained thirteen councils in last May’s local elections, it was fair to say they’d pulled off a resounding success – startling too, given the lack of ground campaigning in many of the areas where they performed their best.
True too was that it became clear that Reform’s ability to govern would indeed at least be partially tested before the next general election. Farage left little room for clarity for what his voters should expect – an end to opportunist, dishonest and self-serving politics at council levels. It was asserted that Britain was broken.
Just a year on, Reform has shown no willing, desire or ability to fix it, and it is becoming astonishingly clear that, on both a local and national level, Reform has already began disproportionately failing their own voters.
Farage’s three core pledges for local administration last year were to reduce debt, reduce council tax, and reduce waste – promises which any canvasser could tell you cut deeply through to the electorate. Within a year, Reform’s 13 councils have already spectacularly about-turned on all three.
Combined, Reform-led councils have already committed to £2.31 billion in borrowing in budgets written and approved by themselves – with every single council proposing to use borrowing to fund a considerable part of their capital projects programmes.
At £446.3 million, Durham County Council – of which former GB News presenter Darren Grimes is the deputy leader and finance portfolio holder, is the most egregious. Worse still, the four-year extent of their budget means that such a large amount will be borrowed over a much shorter timeframe than many other Reform Councils. Lincolnshire’s much longer nine-year plan will add over half the council’s entire pre-reform debt to the council’s balance sheets.
Now it must be noted that borrowing for capital projects is neither inherently wrong or unusual – every council uses borrowing as a funding mechanism for investments in infrastructure, be it for highways or health. Many sensible councils use such borrowing prudently – it is not called prudential borrowing for nothing. But the fact remains that Reform last year pledged to end the practice. Any such pledge has completely evaporated from campaign materials this year.
Gone too are any of Farage’s ill-fated pledges to cut council tax, after tax hikes proposed for consultation by all of Reform’s councils in December and January were met with backlash so severe that Reform’s Worcestershire Deputy Leader resigned from the party live on BBC Politics Midlands in protest. At 8.98 per cent, Reform’s Worcestershire council tax raid was by far the most severe of any across the country. Very few Reform councils backed down and reduced any of the increases at all after consultation; Derbyshire County Council even went as far as to boast that its rise reduction of 0.09 per cent from their original plans meant its 4.90 per cent hike was markedly different from the 5per cent legal maximum.
Some councillors have even gone as far as to describe any increase below the legal maximum as an effective tax cut – anyone seriously believing this would also have to accept that Rachel Revee’s 2025 budget featured a £14 billion tax cut because her 2024 budget contained £40 billion worth of increases.
Perhaps the best explanation for why Reform councillors have so dramatically failed to achieve the first two of these core pledges is because both they and Reform HQ so pitifully attempted to deliver on the third.
Originally touted as the silver bullet to gut waste, Reform’s DOGE team was supposed to demonstrate at council level what a Reform-ran treasury could do at a national level. Instead, DOGE all but collapsed just a week into its June 2025 operations.
In Kent, Zia Yusuf – then head of DOGE, claimed they had found over £2.8 million worth of fraud in the county council’s 2024-25 budget – rapidly found by Reuters to be completely unfounded.
In West Northamptonshire, Reform’s own councillors, who’d been elected on the DOGE platform just weeks earlier, broke relations with DOGE because the team failed to submit legally required documents. The council said DOGE displayed “naivety and a lack of understanding” of local government.
Reform-led Derbyshire gave up on DOGE entirely and ended up having to spend £5 million on external consultants to complete the job properly.
For all the pledges of Farage, Yusuf and candidates alike, it would have been known from the outset that DOGE never had any legal authority to access any council data, voiding the entire premise of a promised forensic financial investigation unit at conception. DOGE was merely a short-lived photocall unit – an embarrassing stain banished from any Reform official’s memory.
More shocking is the additional waste that Reform’s own councillors have lavished on to budgets at their voters’ expense.
Reform Lincolnshire County Council spent £1,325 to widen three parking spaces at the County Hall reserved for the leader, deputy leader and council chair – allegedly to cater for their Leader’s SUV, yet they mooted a policy of de-asphalting some rural roads as a means of reducing pothole maintenance spending – potentially reducing many roads in their core Lincolnshire heartlands to gravel surfacing. This was dropped after significant Conservative backlash, but signals yet another departure from Farage’s original stance on potholes.
Reform-led Nottinghamshire managed to spend £75,000 on purchasing 164 flags to be erected on lampposts across the county – a figure Nottinghamshire Conservatives have pointed out could have filled a thousand potholes. An FOI request has showed that Nottinghamshire county councillors have also managed to eat £5,357 worth of biscuits and cakes provided at meetings since Reform swept most seats last May – the equivalent of 66,136 Jammy Dodgers in a chamber of just 66.
These three broken promises alone demonstrate so painfully the negative impact Reform’s governance has already had on people’s lives – with their own voters often being the worst affected. For a party founded on voters fed up of feeling lied to and unheard, it is remarkable just how quickly every single one of their core promises have been thrown onto the bonfire.
Remarkable too are the products of their councillors’ own localised decision making.
In Durham, Reform councillors have withdrawn grant funding for 50 voluntary and community groups including adult social care and elderly loneliness initiatives.
Going further, Reform councillors in Derbyshire and Lancashire have closed ten adult residential care centres and nine day care centres between them, pushing Residents to use private providers – in Derbyshire’s case costing 200 jobs. Whilst suggestions that Reform’s official policy is to replace the NHS with an insurance-based system are histrionic, it cuts painfully close to the bone that Reform’s only record on taxpayer-funded health and social care is one of gutting and privatisation.
And in Lincolnshire, one of the first acts of the incoming administration was to scrap the council’s flooding committee, despite the fact that Lincolnshire is one of the UK’s most flood-prone counties and has Britain’s most at-risk constituency with 91% of buildings classified as under threat of flood – Richard Tice’s Boston and Skegness, no less.
Nationally, look at any number of the thousands of homogenous Reform X fan accounts and you’ll be met with whole tranches of authoritative-toned support for promises which are not actually Reform policy any longer – including the basic rate income tax uplift to £20,000 which Farage scrapped at a purpose-held press conference in November.
Even popular policies that Reform have kept are fundamentally flawed and in an unworkable state – Zia Yusuf’s Operation Restoring Justice policy paper was published four months late and contains just three and a half pages of bullet pointed text and 38 spelling and grammar errors.
That Zia Yusuf tweeted just a week ago that ‘failed Tories were trying to infiltrate’ them to ‘destroy’ their agenda ‘from within’, and that the right-wing press are spreading lies about Reform because they ‘are an arm of the Tory party’, shows just where Reform’s attention isn’t focused. One must wonder if he’s already bracing them for disappointment.
Furthermore, Yusuf, Braverman, and Reform’s Head of Policy James Orr, have all asserted a concoction of justifications for openness to ‘socialist’ economic policies and declarations that Reform is not a right-wing party. Reform seem to have completely missed the point that their voters are voting for them because they outright reject leftist decline ideologies.
It is clear that Reform have no intention to deliver on the promises that their support base has been built upon.
But if you are still not convinced, hear it from Reformers themselves.
Patrick Benham‑Crosswell resigned as a Reform Senedd candidate in March this year saying, “The Reform Party has betrayed its early members’ vision, labour and achievements” and that “politics is a dirty game, but Reform have sunk deep into a sewer when it should have been a beacon of decency”. Another Senedd candidate, resigning three days later, asserted Reform selected candidates with “little to no connection to the communities they seek to represent” and stating that Reform was no longer compatible with his Christian faith.
Reform’s deputy group leader in Cornwall said that his own views and priorities “for how best to serve local residents” had “increasingly diverged” from Reform’s platform, resigned from the party last October to “continue representing [his] community with honesty and independence”.
Defecting to the Conservatives a month later, Dartford Borough councillor James Buchan tore into Reform, for “relying on rhetoric and slogans” and having “a pretty unfortunate way of treating people“. He asserted that, having seen how Reform operates, he “concluded that the party doesn’t really have the experience or ambition” to help the real working families who look to Reform for support.
Finally, in recent days, the account for Reform’s Rayleigh and Wickford branch has blasted their party’s own wider local elections campaign for having a near total universal disregard for local issues, along with a photo starkly contrasting their own cookie cutter scantily-detailed templated leaflet with the local Conservative candidate’s own heavily localised three-page fold-out.
In all, through resignations and defections, Reform voters last May have already lost over 1 in 10 of the councillors they elected.
As Labour and the Conservatives have so painfully found out, the cardinal sin of politics in contemporary Britain is to accomplish the promises made to the loyalist of their own voters. In the last year, through policy U-turns, manifesto breaches and local failures, Reform have shown a completely contemptuous disregard for the trust of those who’ve supported them the most.
Almost every poll now shows that Reform have now already lost around 1 in 5 of their prospective voters compared to their early autumn peak. Perhaps Reform’s voters are already realising that where Reform wins, they are the ones who lose the most.