A Reform UK-run council is reportedly set to raise council tax rates next year, despite cost-cutting measures inspired by those introduced by Elon Musk in the United States.
Nigel Farage had vowed to save “a lot of money” after his party won control of Kent County Councilat the local elections in May this year.
Two months later, in July, the council introduced a Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge), modelled on Musk’s DOGE in the US, which council leader Linden Kemkaran claimed had identified £40m of potential savings.
A report to council members said the savings would ensure that the council was able to operate within its budget while continuing to “provide the services that residents value most and those required to be delivered by law”.
However, the authority’s new adult social care chief Diane Morton has this week hinted at a rise in residents’ council tax bills as she warned that services in the county were “down to the bare bones”.
Diane Morton told the Financial Times: “We’ve got more demand than ever before and it’s growing, We just want more money.”
While Ms Kemkaran has declined to say if council tax rates will be raised, Ms Morton said she believed the increase would be five per cent, the maximum allowed.
Around 50 per cent of Kent’s annual £2.5bn budget is spent on adult and children’s social care, as well as on children with special education needs.
Labour MP for East Thanet Polly Billington has accused authority chiefs of making “huge promises about savings, then failing to find any because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“That’s what they’re doing in local government and it’s what they’d do to Britain,” she added.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “It turns out cribbing the notes of dodgy American tech billionaires is no way to run a council.”
However, a Reform UK Kent spokesperson said the council had done “fantastic work” to reduce debt by £66m in five months, despite council papers showing it faces a £27.9m overspend in the new year, beyond its £1.53bn budget.
The party’s experience in Kent is a reflection of the obstacles Mr Farage would face if he were elected as prime minister, which includes Reform’s repeated promise to cut taxes and slash public spending.
Ms Kemkaran said that the management of Kent acted as a “shop window through which everybody is going to see what a Reform government might look like”.
A Reform UK Kent spokesman said the council has a new “no more borrowing” policy since this year’s poll.
“Our team in KCC have already done some fantastic work to clean up the mess left by the Kent Conservatives and reduce the county council’s debt by £66 million in their first five months in office,” he said.
“The majority of that has come from savings as a result of their Dolge (Department of Local Government Efficiency) unit.
“This includes implementing a ‘no more borrowing’ policy which will reduce their debt by a further £33 million by March 2026, scrapping KCC’s net zero renewable energy programme to save £32 million over four years, and stopping the move to a new council building which has avoided an additional £14 billion of borrowing.”
