Since Reform UK won control of a dozen councils after May’s local elections, a central question has emerged that goes beyond whether or not the party can actually govern: what does control of local authorities reveal about Reform’s politics?
Reform authorities now oversee billions of pounds in annual public spending, provide statutory services to around 10 million people and exercise influence through capital programmes, procurement decisions and pension funds. If you include the hard-right party’s new mayors in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire, Reform has also acquired real leverage over local labour markets, infrastructure investment and long-term capital allocation.
But local government is where ideology and reality collide. Councils operate under hard budget constraints, the pressures of rising demand for their services and limited revenue-raising powers. The antidote Reform purports to offer voters, on the other hand, has been built on opposition to the state, hostility to taxation and scepticism towards public sector institutions. All of these undermine the actual running of a council, which involves the day-to-day management of social care provision, responsibly borrowing (and paying back) debt, as well as dealing with workforce costs and statutory duties regarding, say, housing or special educational needs, which are imposed by central government.
There has been a tendency among Reform watchers to assume that Nigel Farage’s party will import its national posture—disruptive, populist and dogmatic—into town halls. Yet local government offers no such freedom, and councils have to make trade-offs. With almost every authority in England raising council tax simply to stand still, Reform authorities face an immediate test. Should they freeze taxes, as some candidates promised before being elected, thereby deepening deficits? Or should they retreat, revealing the limits of their anti-tax politics?
The medium-term financial plans of Reform’s largest authorities—county councils—illustrate the bind. On average, Reform-run counties face projected funding shortfalls of £65m over the next three years, compared with £85m in Conservative- and Liberal Democrat-run counties (Labour doesn’t run any). Across all of these authorities, £1.5bn must be found, either through service reductions, council tax increases or both. Crucially, most councils—including Reform’s—already assume council tax rises in their baseline forecasts, so any increases will have to be over and above what is already planned. Freezing council tax does not protect residents from austerity; it simply enlarges the gap that must be closed by cutting spend on services.
This is the political economy dilemma at the heart of Reform-run councils: If council tax rises are unavoidable, what differentiates Reform from the parties it displaced in local government? And if deficits are closed through spending cuts, which parts of the local state will be sacrificed? In a truism often attributed to the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, to govern is to choose. Will Reform cut adult social care, children’s services, libraries, transport or the maintenance of the public realm?
So far, Reform authorities have pointed to at least £330m in “efficiency savings”, but Reform HQ remains conspicuously vague about the total its councils have managed to propose to date. The likely explanation is that the savings mooted are either inherited from previous administrations or are not actually savings at all. Kent County Council’s much-publicised 5 per cent cut to councillors’ allowances—worth a fraction of its annual budget—illustrates the pattern. The gesture may be politically shrewd, but its impact will be negligible. More tellingly, the savings are being recycled into a councillor-controlled scheme for discretionary local projects, giving Kent more opportunity to decide who gets what.
More consequential is Reform’s approach to capital and investment. Here the party’s dogma may be its Achilles’ heel. Council pension funds often invest in local assets, while many authorities borrow directly to put money into regeneration projects in their area. Reform’s hostility to clean energy investors—and Richard Tice’s very public intervention urging the Local Government Pension Scheme to divest from renewables—does significant damage to investor confidence. Less investment, needless to say, is bad news for authorities, which benefit from the business rates that local employers pay. Lower investment levels yield lower business rates. And if a business decides to go elsewhere then a council might have to pick up the opportunity cost, supporting families in debt or at risk of homelessness if local employment is reduced as a result. Actively seeking to undermine local economies is not a political strategy that is likely to pay an electoral dividend in the long run.
Yet the political incentives do not necessarily encourage Reform to try its best at local level. Voters often don’t punish councils for delivering poor public services. Polling consistently shows that the economy, immigration and the NHS—none of which councils control—inform voter behaviour. As such, Reform’s threshold for success at local government level is low. If its councils do not visibly collapse—as Thurrock, Birmingham and Croydon did in recent years under the Conservatives and Labour—the party will likely claim victory.
So in local government, Reform faces a paradox: a party rhetorically opposed to the state is now embedded within its most financially constrained tier; it is ideologically committed to resisting tax increases, but structurally dependent on local revenues via taxation; it is sceptical of public investment, yet reliant on capital and investment to keep the local economies it serves afloat. In one sense, the question is not whether Reform can govern well—but whether, once exposed to the realities of running a local council, it can govern differently to the worldview it espouses.
