‘If anyone would like to know what their future government [would be] like, I think they should come down to Kent and see that Kent County Council is on the verge of imploding.’
Reform UK’s performance in local government has not received glowing reviews so far, with dozens of council meetings having been cancelled and councillors failing to show up.
Speaking on LBC, Tanya from Kent delivered a scathing assessment of how Kent County Council is faring under the party’s leadership.
Tanya said to LBC’s Ali Miraj: “I just think if anyone would like to know what their future government was like [sic], I think they should come down to Kent and see that Kent County Council is on the verge of imploding. It’s just stopped.”
Reform UK won 57 of the council’s 81 seats last month. But between the election and up to 4 July, Reform has cancelled 40% – nine out of 22 – of its scheduled meetings.
Across the 12 Reform-controlled councillors, at least 21 Reform councillors have missed their first meetings, despite the majority of them only having had one meeting to attend in their first month.
Tanya slammed Reform’s inexperience: Only five [of the 57] have ever been near a council before. They haven’t set up any committees, no one wants to do them, so they can’t access the training.”
She added: “They’re running it and it’s in absolute freefall. It’s in chaos.”
Last week, the local opposition, Folkestone and Hythe Lib Dems said in a statement that Reform has also yet to confirm which, if any, scrutiny committees will be formed.
Miraj said: “It seems like the answer to the question you’re giving Tanya is that they’re not ready for government at all.”
Tanya said: “They’re not at all. As I said, four people have had experience on a council before and none of them know what they’re doing. They’re not forming committees and so they’re not getting any training for it.”
She said former Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf, now head of ‘Doge’, was in county hall last week “swanning around putting his Doge on everybody, and then we’re not surprised he had to have a lie down.”
She added: “If you saw the Kent County Council books it’s been run into the ground by the Tories for the last 15 years. No Doge is going to fix that.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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