Nigel Farage has vowed to be Britain’s Elon Musk, promising a Doge-style initiative to eradicate frivolous spending by “fat and lazy” local authorities that are “taking taxpayers for mugs”.
Farage wants Doge-style teams inside as many of England’s city halls as possible in the hope of cutting waste and freeing up more money for frontline services. The Reform leader has pledged to “send in the auditors” into every council his party wins on 1 May.
They warned Farage that UK employment law was stronger than in the US, so any attempt to cut entire departments or make mass firings could lead to costly legal action.
Reform has also flagged Shropshire Council spending £ 1,000 a day on a pothole consultant and Durham County Council covering a £40,000 trip by executives to a property conference in France.
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Dr Carr-West thinks any money saved from moves like cutting consultants would be a drop in the ocean compared with wider funding cuts from Westminster.
“Farage might say it’s absurd that a council is spending money on ergonomic chairs. Well, okay – buy cheaper chairs in future. Any savings you might make just don’t co-relate with the billions in funding cuts we’ve seen.”
But the crisis is even wider. Councils across England and Wales have been forced to make cuts to services of £24.5bn since David Cameron’s Government launched its austerity drive in 2010, according to the Local Government Association.
Andy Pike, professor of regional development studies at Newcastle University, who has analysed councils’ finances in detail, said Farage’s claims of frivolous spending by town halls was “baseless”.
He said the “low-hanging fruit” of cuts to back-office administration was done during the austerity era of the 2010s. “The characterisation of a ‘bloated’ public sector ripping off the local taxpayer – I just don’t recognise that at all.”
Elon Musk and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort (Photo: Stuart Mitchell/Reform UK/PA Wire)How councils could save money
However, he suggested the political climate and financial pressures meant many councils may have to get on the front foot and make further efficiency savings – possibly by partnering with neighbouring local authorities.
Professor Pike said the creation of mayoral combined authorities and Labour’s wider local government shake-up – aimed at creating single-tier or unitary areas – should help reduce admin costs.
Farage warned last week that Reform’s teams would end the work from home culture and tell council staff, “you either work from the office or you’re gone”.
Max Caller, the local government guru sent in to get cash-strapped Birmingham back on track, said the local authorities which have gone bust created a disaster “much of their own making”.
Labour-led Birmingham shelled out than £100m on the botched roll-out of its Oracle IT project, as well as spending £760m bill to settle equal pay claims.
Caller defended the council’s stance and said “green shoots” of financial recovery were evident.
“Some councils were not prepared to face up to the hard consequences of reducing services. They thought they could get out of trouble with property deals without appreciating the risk that entailed.”
Birmingham has had several weeks of bin strikes (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP)
Short shrift from union bosses
Farage may have hoped for some union support for his war on wasteful council bosses. But workers’ representatives dismissed the Reform agenda.
Farage, who blamed the company for problems with inappropriate candidates at the general election, said Reform now had a vetting system “as good if not better than the other parties”.
The union boss warned that any Doge-style initiative in the UK “risks getting rid of vital services and skills which will be either impossible to replace or expensive [to replace] in the form of consultants”.
While Musk has boasted about putting entire agencies like Usaid (United States Agency for International Development) “in the wood chipper”, some departments have been forced to rehire sacked officials to keep things running.
Local government gurus pointed out that many frontline services in the UK were mandatory, making it hard to axe large areas at once.
Dr Carr-West of the LGiU added: “We have much stronger employment rules than they do in the US, so you can’t dismiss people arbitrarily, for something simplistic like working from home.
A Reform UK spokesman said the party was not interested in making “empty promises”, vowing to free up money for frontline services by cutting out all waste.
He said Reform-run councils would “send in the auditors, evaluate council contracts and cut the waste to get our councils back on track and delivering for local people once again”.
Around 1,600 council seats are up for grabs this week. Farage’s party – which did not exist at the last equivalent local elections in 2021 – could win almost 700 council seats, according to last month’s Electoral Calculus mega-poll.
Tory polling guru Lord Hayward said Reform could seize control of around 450 seats, most of them in the Midlands and the North of England.
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