In the brutalist surroundings of Durham’s ageing county hall, insurgent populist party Reform UK was on Wednesday morning preparing to take the reins of power for the first time in its short history.
“Am I nervous? Yes,” Durham county council’s new deputy leader, Darren Grimes, told the Financial Times ahead of being sworn in.
“Am I anxious to get started? Absolutely. You bet your bottom dollar.”
Grimes, previously better known as a presenter on the right-wing TV station GB News, was one of 677 Reform councillors elected across England on May 1 as Nigel Farage’s party swept to power in 10 local authorities and two mayoralties.
Last week they moved from the campaign trail to the council chamber in formal meetings up and down the country.
“My number one priority is ensuring people can get the best bang for their buck,” added Grimes.
“More and more people right now feel they’re paying more and more and more — because they are — and getting less and less and less.”
His remarks reflect a key Reform message during May’s elections, in which the party pitched local equivalents of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to voters weary of deteriorating roads, diminishing bin collections and rising council tax bills.
Grimes and his colleagues now inherit the acute financial crises driving that dissatisfaction.
Since a first wave of cuts began 15 years ago, English council funding has consistently failed to keep pace with demand, with soaring costs driven in particular by a snowballing crisis in social care.
Reform councillors are now responsible for just under £10bn worth of budgets for local services.
Their councils had already cut £500mn in expenditure ahead of this financial year in order to balance the books — a legal requirement — and face about £750mn in forecast shortfalls over the next five years, according to Financial Times analysis.
Local Reform leaderships are so far largely tight-lipped about their expenditure plans.
Kent county council’s new leader Linden Kemkaran announced the creation of a Department for Local Government Efficiency, but said there were unlikely to be any significant changes to the annual budget set a few weeks ago.
In Durham, Grimes has promised fresh audits of council books in order to drive out waste.
Local authority accounts are already subject to statutory audits, which have been delayed across the country because of chronic backlogs, but he told the FT that his plan was for “citizen’s audit”.
This would allow “people on a grass roots level to be able to scrutinise contracts”, he said.
Grimes said his group’s “aspiration” was to reduce council tax, but Reform’s financial room for manoeuvre is likely to be limited. Durham’s budget papers for 2025/26 stated that without a maximum rise in the charge, the council would this year have needed to raid £18mn in reserves.
On average, Reform councils are now spending 73 per cent of their funding on social care, FT analysis shows, leaving little for discretionary spending.
Professor Tony Travers, local government specialist at the London School of Economics, said Reform councillors would probably find little obvious waste to trim.
“The problem they’ve got is that most of the councils they’ve taken over were Tory-controlled,” he said.
“Conservatives in county government were generally pretty efficient and not known for their overspends on [diversity, equalities and inclusion] initiatives.”
Reform’s Doge-style agenda hit an initial hitch after the resignation within days of their wins of three councillors — in Durham, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire — triggering by-elections each costing more than £20,000.
Grimes conceded the situation was “unfortunate”. But he pointed to veteran parties of local government, such as Labour at bankrupt Birmingham council, as proof that “we have to be careful about arguing that experience is what really matters here.”
Other Reform leaderships have been keen to stress that their ranks do not entirely comprise local government ingenues. In many cases its new leaders have been councillors before, either as independents or Conservatives.
In Lancashire, council leader Stephen Atkinson previously led nearby Ribble Valley council for the Tories, before he defected to Reform in March.
Lancashire is one of three Reform councils to inherit a particular crisis in special education needs provision.
In its latest reports, Ofsted pointed to “widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children” in Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, in particular highlighting long delays for support for families.
Kent and Derbyshire have also been running huge government-sanctioned deficits because of the soaring cost of transport for children with special educational needs.
Reform councils have already made a number of cost-free decisions and announcements that reflect the party’s national agenda.
Durham, Derbyshire and Lancashire axed committees and roles devoted to climate change.
Lincolnshire council scrapped the authority’s standalone flood committee in the face of vociferous opposition from Conservatives and Labour, who warned that the county had been repeatedly hit by devastating floods that needed close co-ordination to tackle.
Ukrainian and Pride flags were also removed from outside several county halls.
Reform councils are likely to be a thorn in the Labour government’s side as it tries to roll out a reorganisation of local government and a related devolution agenda.
The government’s plans would “carve up our county and essentially remove our unique identity”, Kent’s Kemkaran said, adding: “We could lose that sense of being one county, one people.”
But there are already hints that local leaders may not follow Reform’s national message to the letter.
Hull and East Yorkshire’s mayor Luke Campbell last week signed up to a pan-northern partnership that has cited green energy investment as its top priority, despite Reform’s national deputy leader Richard Tice vowing to use “every lever” available to block renewable projects.
Grimes said the national leadership would “absolutely not” be dictating the decisions of local councils.
While Reform has, to date, campaigned and operated in a highly centralised fashion, Travers said Farage might be wise to allow some latitude.
“Reform’s best approach would be to allow significant local divergence from many national policy positions,” he said. “As the old saying goes, there’s no right or leftwing way of emptying a dustbin.”
