Reform’s first crack at power is already in crisis

When Reform UK won control of Kent, wiping out the Tories in one of their strongest rural heartlands, Nigel Farage called it a “tectonic shift in British politics”.

Linden Kemkaran, the newly elected Kent county council leader, promised to offer the nation a window into what Reform could achieve in power.

Her administration became the test run for Reform’s cost-cutting drive, modelled on chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the US. But just five months on, the experiment seems to have run out of steam.

During the May election campaign, Reform lambasted the previous Tory leadership for increasing council tax bills by the maximum 5pc each year. Farage, speaking at his Kent campaign launch rally, pointed to the increase as evidence that the county was “broken” and promised “only Reform can fix it”.

But in an about-turn, Kemkaran’s cabinet member for social care last week told the Financial Times that spending was “down to the bare bones” and said taxes would probably have to go up 5pc again.

The announcement has sparked a strong backlash. Reform supporters told The Telegraph they would “never vote for them again”, saying the row shows the party is “just like all the others, promising the world but never delivering”.

Opposition councillors say the party’s chainsaw had turned out to be “made out of sponge”.

Kemkaran has since insisted no decision has been made on council tax but admitted to The Telegraph that the row was a “bump in the road”. She says it is “too early to say” what rate the council will implement – a very different tone from the one she adopted in the aftermath of her landslide victory when she called the levy a “massive bill”.

Kemkaran: ‘Cutting taxes is our ultimate aim’

The Reform leader now claims that a new consultation survey of Kent voters shows that three quarters of the electorate support council tax increases.

“I only got this yesterday and I thought now that is interesting,” she says, adding: “The fact is the majority of people understand that to maintain the services that we supply here, it costs money.”

Kemkaran says that, like the Labour Party in national government, she has come into office only to find a black hole in Kent’s finances left by the Tories.

“When we came in, we started looking through the books properly. Lots of people would say it was all in the public domain, why didn’t you do your research before you got elected?

“But we can now see the extent of how far the can was kicked down the road by the Conservatives. We’ve not banged on about that because that’s not the type of people we are.

“You have not heard me as leader blame the previous administration… but what I’m telling you is that we are now realising just how far the Conservatives did kick that can down the road.”

“Cutting taxes is our ultimate aim. Of course it is. It is going to happen,” she says, before admitting: “I can’t tell you when. Local authorities are oil tankers, not speedboats.”

Kent county council was in £732m of debt in 2024-25 and is projected to reduce its borrowings to £650m by 2026-27.

But that change is in line with a long-term downward trend, with the debt burden having also fallen in the final years of the previous Conservative administration, down from £771m in 2023-24.

‘I’ll never vote for them again’

Walking the streets of Maidstone, which forms part of Kemkaran’s constituency, the row has gone down like a lead balloon.

Peter James, 60, a retired tech support worker from Lenham, voted for Reform but now says he regrets his decision and will “never vote for them again”.

“They are the same as all the other parties, they’ll promise the world but never deliver. I’m a low tax and small government man. The last time someone kept their promises in this country was Margaret Thatcher.”

Charlie Montsern, 46, a Reform voter and taxi driver from Maidstone, says: “I feel let down by it. We pay too much tax for what we get back.”

Luke May and Clare Marno, 35 and 41, says: “We’re not surprised that they’re not going to lower it. They’re politicians at the end of the day and were never going to help people like us.”

Paulene Hardes, 79, a retired office manager born and raised in Maidstone, voted Conservative and says she wasn’t surprised by the row.

“People thought it would be refreshing if Reform were in charge. But they all promise they are going to be different.

“I was actually astonished when they won here. If you talk to a lot of young people, they love them because they’re fed up with all the immigrants. But Reform have never run a council before and they have no experience.”

‘Reality has collided with ideology’

Reform’s “Doge” project to cut waste has also run up against legal issues in Kent. In July, senior lawyers blocked external figures like Zia Yusuf from accessing the council’s internal data over GDPR concerns.

“That would have been the ideal scenario,” Kemkaran admits, discussing the early attempts by Yusuf to come in and help run Kent’s Doge programme, “but it couldn’t happen”.

Instead, Kent has adopted their own local version of the programme, naming it the “Department of Local Government Efficiency” – or “Dolge”.

Christopher Hespe, a councillor involved in the programme, described Dolge in July as “a movement, a force, an energy”. And Brian Collins, deputy Reform leader, announced the repayment of a council loan with Barclays by pulling out a large cardboard cheque tied with a red bow. Collins told the chamber it made him feel like “a petulant child just before Christmas”.

But opposition councillors claim that the Reform administration’s “publicity stunts” have amounted to few real achievements.

Tory Cllr Sarah Hudson said watching Reform in power felt like reading the Emperor’s New Clothes.

“They campaigned on the basis they were going to reduce everyone’s council tax. They were going to go in and find all these wasteful amounts of money being spent.

“What’s actually happened is that they’ve discovered that everything the previous Conservative administration could do to cut things to the bone has been done.

“You’re not going to walk in and find a secret oil painting by Vermeer or something in a cupboard.”

Antony Hook, leader of the Liberal Democrats in Kent, says Reform was convinced they could make large savings from cutting the county’s budget on asylum seekers.

“They were really fixated on it. Every question they’d ask would be about the cost of asylum. We kept explaining that KCC doesn’t have that large a role in that and how it’s mainly a Home Office expense.

“We tried to explain that the big problem is adult social care, but they would just say: ‘What about asylum?’

“This is where reality has now collided with ideology. They said they’d take their chainsaw to a forest of waste. But the chainsaw seems to have been made out of sponge, and rather than a forest they’ve found an open field where there’s nothing to use it on.”

‘Naivety and incompetence’

As Reform comes to terms with the realities of stretched local government budgets, Kemkaran is drawing up a new set of policies she hopes will help raise new revenue sources.

One of the more controversial of these is the idea of a “foreign freight tax” on lorries coming into the UK through Dover.

“The idea is to tax lorries as they come off the ferries and the Eurotunnel”, she explains.

“They are using our roads. Obviously we get a lot of through traffic going across to and from the Continent accessing the rest of the UK. It’s using our infrastructure and we have to pick up the bill.

“It’s one of the many ways we’re thinking of bringing money in.”

But the proposals have been lambasted by opposition councillors as unfeasible. Councillor Hook says the idea is “fantastical”, while Tory councillor Harry Rayner says it shows “naivety and incompetence”.

“Implementing a foreign freight tax is not and never has been within the power of Kent county council,” Rayner says, adding: “That is a power reserved for the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

When asked about the criticisms, Kemkaran says: “They’re just jealous they never thought of it.”

Despite the challenges facing Reform’s first council, Kemkaran is confident that her project will succeed.

“It’s going to be a bump in the road, that’s all it is. When you get close to the target you get a lot of flak. That is what is happening over this council tax row,” she says.

“People are suddenly thinking: ‘We can get them’ – but they can’t, because we’re moving in the right direction. We’re absolutely confident.

“The things we’re doing in this council, they’ve never been done before,” she continues, adding: “There’s not an ounce of chaos in this office I can tell you that.”

But if Kent is a window into what Reform could look like in power, it would seem that some voters aren’t all that impressed with what they’re seeing.